The Uniformization Method in Performability Analysis

During the last few years a technique to find transient solutions for Markov models, called uniformization or randomization, has become widely used. Reasons such as the simplicity of the basic result, numerical robustness and the probabilistic interpretation which leads to many extensions, help to explain the popularity of the method. We survey the foundations of the technique and describe several extensions proposed in the literature. We present algorithms that are useful in calculating various performability measures.