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We consider a standard splitting algorithm for the rare-event simulation of overflow probabilities in any subset of stations in a Jackson network at level n, starting at a fixed initial position. It was shown in DeanDup09 that a subsolution to the Isaacs equation guarantees that a subexponential number of function evaluations (in n) suffice to estimate such overflow probabilities within a given relative accuracy. Our analysis here shows that in fact O(n^{2{\beta}+1}) function evaluations suffice to achieve a given relative precision, where {\beta} is the number of bottleneck stations in the network. This is the first rigorous analysis that allows to favorably compare splitting against directly computing the overflow probability of interest, which can be evaluated by solving a linear system of equations with O(n^{d}) variables., Comment: 23 pages

This dissertation explores a few topics in the study of rare events in stochastic systems, with a particular emphasis on the simulation aspect. This line of research has been receiving a substantial amount of interest in recent years, mainly motivated by scientific and industrial applications in which system performance is frequently measured in terms of events with very small probabilities.The topics mainly break down into the following themes: Algorithm Analysis: Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5. Simulation Design: Chapters 3, 4 and 5. Modeling: Chapter 5. The titles of the main chapters are detailed as follows: Chapter 2: Analysis of a Splitting Estimator for Rare Event Probabilities in Jackson Networks Chapter 3: Splitting for Heavy-tailed Systems: An Exploration with Two Algorithms Chapter 4: State Dependent Importance Sampling with Cross Entropy for Heavy-tailed Systems Chapter 5: Stochastic Insurance-Reinsurance Networks: Modeling, Analysis and Efficient Monte Carlo