An Application of BlockSim's Log of Simulations
The need for understanding the risk of certain assumptions or predictions has resulted in the use of variability metrics in multiple disciplines, from the quality control field to financial applications. The most widely used metric to express variability is standard deviation (or variance, the square of the standard deviation). Given the expected value of a metric and a standard deviation, one can obtain the metric of interest at any confidence level, sometimes expressed in terms of the risk level α. However, this assumes that the metric in question follows a normal distribution (the well-known, symmetric, bell-shaped curve). In reality, many measures do not exhibit such behavior. This article will present a simple example of an asymmetric estimate using system availability and BlockSim 7. The simulation log feature of BlockSim 7 will then be used for further analysis of the mean availability via a non-parametric approach followed by a parametric approach in order to obtain bounds.