Efficient Generation of PH-Distributed Random Variates

Abstract

Phase-type (PH) distributions are being used to model a wide range of phenomena in performance and dependability evaluation. The resulting models may be employed in analytical as well as in simulation-driven approaches. Simulations require the efficient generation of random variates from PH distributions. PH distributions have different representations and different associated computational costs for random-variate generation. In this paper we study the problem of efficient representation and efficient generation of PH distributed variates.