Artificial immune systems (AIS) are one of natural computing inspired by the natural immune system. The fault detection, the pattern recognition, the system control and the optimization are major application area of artificial immune systems. This paper gives a concept of artificial immune systems and useful techniques as like the clonal selection, the immune network theory and the negative selection. A concise survey on the optimization problem based on artificial immune systems is generated. The overall performance of artificial immune systems for the optimization problem is discussed.