6. Conclusion

The Markov approach is a very powerful and flexible method for analyzing dynamic systems. Over and above conventional reliability and availability assessments, it offers resources that are often unsuspected by reliability engineers, as it opens the way to calculations of economic parameters such as production availability, and enables the modeling of systems with several operating phases.

The main limitations are the impossibility of using laws other than exponential, and the combinatorial explosion in the number of states, which limits its rigorous implementation to small systems. Approximate methods do exist, however, which allow us to push back this limit to a certain extent.

Thanks to today's tools, it can practically be implemented without having to manipulate a single mathematical formula, but a minimum understanding of the underlying...