BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
          ID:: SBCS//stark/steadystate.ps.gz
       ENTRY:: January 19, 2003
ORGANIZATION:: State University of New York at Stony Brook, Computer Science
       TITLE:: Compositional Calculation of Steady-State Probabilities
        TYPE:: Technical Report
      AUTHOR:: Stark, Eugene W.
     CONTACT:: Eugene W. Stark, Department of Computer Science,
                   SUNY at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4400
                   Tel: 631-632-8444 <stark@cs.sunysb.edu>
        DATE:: January 19, 2003
   RETRIEVAL:: HTTP from BSD7.CS.SUNYSB.EDU with the URL
		   http://bsd7.cs.sunysb.edu/~pioa/Papers/steadystate.abstract

ABSTRACT::

We describe a method for converting the problem of computing
steady-state probabilities of a continuous-time Markov chain into the
problem of computing absorption probabilities for a related chain.
The construction enables us to apply compositional techniques for
computing absorption probabilities that we have previously developed
for "probabilistic I/O automata" to be used for computing certain
steady-state quantities as well.  The method has been implemented, and
we consider the issue of its practicality in the context of its
application to an an example problem.