Abstract
The immune system is a complex and distributed system. It provides a multilayered form of defence, capable of identifying and responding to harmful pathogens that it does not recognise as “self”. The framework proposed in this paper incorporates a number of immunological concepts and principles, including the multilayered defence and the cooperation between cells in the adaptive immune system. An alternative model of positive selection is also presented. It is suggested that the framework discussed here could lead to reduced false positive responses in anomaly detection tasks, such as intrusion detection, as well being extended to a population of computational immune systems that are able to maintain population diversity of recognition and response.