Evaluation &

Properties of
Erlang B Formula

Akmal Mardhatillah
1304105010063

Evaluation of Erlangs B
Formula

Evaluation of erlang B formula

Formula (4.10) is not very appropriate, since both n! and A
increase quickly so that overflow in the computer will occur.
Then we get :
From a manual calculation point of view, the inverse linear form
(4.28) may be simpler:

Properties of Erlang's Bformula

Non-integral number of channels

For practical application, we need to generalize value of erlang
B formula to Non-Integral
We defined as :

where x and A are real numbers and A > 0. The incomplete

gamma function is defined as:

 For integral values of x which we denote by n

this can be rewritten as:

 which inserted in (4.31) yields:

The recursion formula (4.29) will still be valid as we

have:

Insentivity
Insensitivity: A system is insensitive to the holding time
distribution if the state probabilities of the system only
depend on the mean value of the holding time.
(holding time = service time)
Poisson distribution (4.6) and the truncated Poisson distribution
(4.9) only depend on the holding time.
All classical loss systems with full accessibility are insensitive to
the holding time distribution.

Derivatives of Erlang-B formula

and convexity
The Erlang-B formula is a function of the offered traffic A and
the number of channels n which in general may be a real nonnegative number.
In some cases when we want to optimise systems we need the
partial derivatives of Erlang-B formula.

Derivative of Erlang-B formula

with respect to A
Erlang B Formula :

where {n,A} > 0 are non-negative real numbers, and Qn

denotes the denominator (normalizing constant). We need the
derivative with respect to A:

 Dimana:
From (4.35) we then get:

Derivative of Erlang-B formula

with respect to n
It can be shown that:

Esteves & Craveirinha & Cardoso (1995)

Let the inverse value of the derivative of order k be denoted by I k (A, x), we
then have:

where I0 (A, x) = Ix (A) given by (4.30). It can be shown that the Erlang-B
formula is convex for n > 1, as this is equivalent to the following requirement:

Inverse Erlang-B formula

i.e. n as a function of (A, E) and A as a function of (n, E)
may be obtained by means of Newton-Raphson
iteration (Szybicki, 1967)

The following functions should be used:

 The initial value of th e number of channels x is chosen so that :

The numerical problems are also dealt with by Farmer & Kaufman
(1978) and Jagerman (1984 ).

Approximations for Erlang-B

formula

In the literature various approximations for Ex (A), 0 x

< 1, are published.
Yngve Rapp (1964 ) applies a parabola:

 Another approximation
Szybicki (1967).

is

published

by

The most accurate values are obtain by using

a
continued-fraction
method
of
the
incomplete gamma function (Levy-Soussan,
1968 )