Some Considerations on the Markov Approach to Reliability

The dimension of the transition rate matrix is a big problem in solving reliability problems using the Markov approach; this limitation can be partially overcome by using the sparsity and structure properties of this matrix, the problem is presented in the first part of this paper. The second part is a brief outline of a computer program to solve automatically the stationary Markov description of systems. The third part contains a discussion about what is the system behaviour described by a non stationary Markov process.