Determination of Service Effectiveness to Individual Terminals in Multiterminal Capacity-Limited Systems

This paper presents an approach for analyzing the effectiveness of service to individual terminals in a multiterminal capacity-limited system. It is shown that definitions for system effectiveness indices can not be applied directly to the problem of evaluating service effectiveness provided to an individual terminal in the system because not all system states can be unambiguously classified as good or bad from the viewpoint of the terminal. The ambiguity is resolved by assigning service priorities to each of the terminals. It then becomes possible to define a consistent and unambiguous set of terminal service effectiveness indices which are functions of individual component failure and repair rates, system structure, system demand, and the service priorities assigned to all terminals. The implication of this approach to analyzing effectiveness indices for terminals is that it provides a means for quantifying the effects of service policy on service effectiveness to individual terminals. Examples clearly demonstrate that the priority of service assigned can measurably and appreciably affect the quality of service provided to particular terminals. Since the defined indices of availability of service and frequency and duration of service failure can be directly related to the economic impacts of service failure, such analysis also permits study of potential economic effects of several service policies.