Determination of maintenance floats using Buzen's algorithm

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Abstract
This paper applies Buzen's algorithm to the problem of determining the maintenance float needed to support an operating system with N circulating units. A maintenance network with load-independent servers is assumed. The operating system availability and maintenance floats are obtained using this iterative algorithm. It is shown that the normalizing constant used in the algorithm can easily be computed for the maintenance float problem by using geometric series. This result is further used to obtain a simple model for the expected number of operating units, thus making it easy to compute the operating system availability for any given N. Buzen's algorithm therefore provides a simple solution to the maintenance float problem.