Some Useful Approximations for the Availability Function

Abstract

Availability function which forms an important part of reliability analysis is expressed in terms of an integral equation. The analytical solution of such an equation is possible only in very simple cases and hence approximations are the only tools available; very few such approximations are available in the literature. This paper proposes three useful approximations, two of which are based only on the first few moments of the underlying distributions and do not require their functional forms. The third approximation uses the Riemannian sum to approximate the integral equation. Numerical illustrations based on test cases are provided to show the efficacy of the approximations. As an application, the problem of an opportunistic channel access scheme in a communication network is used to test the approximations.