Abstract: The biological immune system is a complex adaptive system. There are lots of benefits for building the model of the immune system. For biological researchers, they can test some hypotheses about the infection process or simulate the responses of some drugs. For computer researchers, they can build distributed, robust and fault tolerant networks inspired by the functions of the immune system. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the literatures on modelling the immune system. From the methodology perspective, the paper compares and analyzes the existing approaches and models, and also demonstrates the focusing research effort on the future immune models in the next few years.

Key words: agent-based simulation, immune system modelling, complex adaptive system (CAS), HIV