Drawing inspiration from how vaccines work in the body, Oklahoma State University researchers have developed an “artificial immune system”* that can be enhanced to quickly identify optimum solutions by being injected with certain points in decision space that act as weak antigens, or vaccines.

Once in the algorithm, the vaccines activate the antibody population to incorporate more diverse antibodies and explore new landscapes in decision space, so that the antibodies continually come closer to locating a desired local optimum point.

* The field of artificial immune systems (AIS) is an emerging branch of evolutionary computation in which computational systems are based on the structure and behavior of the immune system. By providing methods in pattern recognition, data analysis, and machine learning, AIS has applications in fields including computer science, robotics, information technology, and MRI image processing.