This paper reports simulation experiments, applying the cross entropy method suchas the importance sampling algorithm for efficient estimation of rare event probabilities in Markovian reliability systems. The method is compared to various failurebiasing schemes that have been proved to give...

In this article we consider the efficient estimation of the tail distribution of the maximum of correlated normal random variables. We show that the currently recommended Monte Carlo estimator has difficulties in quantifying its precision, because its sample variance estimator is an inefficient...

There are various importance sampling schemes to estimate rare event probabilities in Markovian systems such as Markovian reliability models and Jackson networks. In this work, we present a general state dependent importance sampling method which partitions the state space and applies the...