An efficient stiffness-insensitive method for transient analysis of Markov availability models

This paper proposes a hybrid approach (HybApp) for numerical transient solution of Markov availability models. It solves both stiff and nonstiff models using a heuristic that provides timely, inexpensive stiffness detection in the model. If the model is found stiff, then a stiff ordinary-differential-equation method is used to solve it from that point onwards, otherwise we continue to use uniformization. Numerical results show the advantages of HybApp.