A Beginners Guide to Systems Simulation in Immunology

Abstract: Some common systems modelling and simulation approaches for immune problems are Monte Carlo simulations, system dynamics, discrete-event simulation and agent-based simulation. These methods, however, are still not widely adopted in immunology research. In addition, to our knowledge, there is few research on the processes for the development of simulation models for the immune system. Hence, for this work, we have two contributions to knowledge. The first one is to show the importance of systems simulation to help immunological research and to draw the attention of simulation developers to this research field. The second contribution is the introduction of a quick guide containing the main steps for modelling and simulation in immunology, together with challenges that occur during the model development. Further, this paper introduces an example of a simulation problem, where we test our guidelines.