Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2016
In this work Markov chains governed by complicated processes are introduced and investigated (Section 1). In Section 2 an ergodic theorem for these processes is formulated, while in Section 3 the sojourn time of the process in a fixed region is studied; in Section 4 some examples are considered. The processes studied are of practical importance in the description of mass service systems and the theory of reliability for which the time intervals between successive demands cannot be assumed to be mutually independent random variables. It is shown that the dependence parameter r of these processes, if it is sufficiently large, allows us to formulate a relationship between the time intervals in question.