Biological Immunity and Software Resilience: Two Faces of the Same Coin?

Abstract

Biological systems modeling and simulation is an important stream of research for both biologists and computer scientists. On the one hand, biologists ask for systemic approaches to model biological systems to the purpose of simulating them on a computer and predicting their behavior, which is resilient by nature. This would limit as much as possible the number of experiments in laboratory, which are known to be expensive, often impracticable, hardly reproducible, and slow. On the other hand, beyond facing the development challenges related to the achievement of the resilience to be offered by biological system simulators, computer scientists ask for a well-established engineering methodology to systematically deal with the peculiarities of software resilient systems, in their more general sense. In line with this, in this paper we report on our preliminary study of immune systems a particular kind of biological systems aimed at devising software abstractions that enable the systematic modeling of resilient systems and their automated treatment. We propose a bio-inspired concept architecture for structuring resilient systems based on the Akka implementation of the widely-known Actor Model, which supports scalable and resilient concurrent computation. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents a first preliminary step towards devising a bio-inspired paradigm for engineering the development of resilient software systems.