A device is subject to a series of shocks which cause damage and eventually failure will occur at the time of arrival of one of the shocks. In between the shocks, the device is partially repaired as the cumulative damage decreases as some Markov process. The device must be replaced upon failure at some cost but it can also be replaced before failure at a lower cost. We consider the general case where the failure rate need not be increasing and replacement can be made at any time. The form of the optimal replacement policy is found and fairly general conditions are given for which a control limit policy is optimal.

Two classes of ergodic stationary multitype spatial point processes are constructed. These processes have the property that interactions between the types exist, but cannot be detected using standard second-order methods of analysis. Simulations indicate that the interactions can, however, be detected by using ‘empty space' techniques.

The existence of ordinary and exponential moments of a point process with conditional intensity of the form is deduced from a Markov chain representation for t – ρN(t). These results form an application of recent theorems of Tweedie (1983a, b) and are used to obtain laws of large numbers for a range of functionals of the process.

If the survival function satisfies the functional equation

where e = (1, …, 1), and if the marginal distributions are exponential, then is the multivariate exponential distribution of Marshall and Olkin. The functional equation has many solutions if the requirement of exponential marginals is not imposed, but the class of possible marginals is somewhat limited (e.g., marginals must be absolutely continuous). The class of possible solutions of the equation is characterized in this paper, and several examples are obtained from models for dependence that may be of practical interest.

In reliability studies, it is well known that the mean residual life function determines the distribution function uniquely. In this paper we show how closely we can determine a distribution when its median residual life function M[S | t] is known. This amounts to solving the functional equation , where R is the reliability function. We actually study a more general functional equation f(φ(t)) = sf(t) called Schroder's equation. It is shown that, under mild assumptions on φ, the solution is of the form f(t) = f0(t)k(log f0 (t)), where f0 is a well-behaved particular solution which can be constructed and k is a periodic function; thus the solution is not unique. Two examples are solved to illustrate the method. Finally, these examples are used to solve the problem of linear M[S | t] studied by Schmittlein and Morrison. As an extra benefit, all of our results hold equally well for the more general sth percentile residual life function.

A generalisation of multistate coherent structures is proposed where the state of each component in a binary coherent structure can take any value in the unit interval, as can the structure function. The notions of duality, critical elements and strong coherency for such a structure are discussed and the functional form of the structure function is analysed. An expression is derived for the distribution function of the state of the system, given the distributions of the states of the components, and generalisations of the Moore–Shannon and IFRA and NBU closure theorems are proved. The states of the components are then permitted to vary with time and a first-passage-time distribution is discussed. A simple model for such a process, based on the concept of partial availability, is then proposed. Lastly, an alternative continuum structure function is introduced and discussed.

We analyze certain self-organizing filing techniques when accesses are assumed to be dependent on each other. The stream of requests for accessing records in a file is modelled as a Markov chain. A general framework is introduced to obtain the asymptotic search cost of a memory-free self-organizing heuristic. The move-to-front heuristic is studied in detail. A formula for the asymptotic search cost, which generalizes that in the case of independent accesses, is obtained. Numerical examples on the performance of the transposition heuristic are provided, and compared with that of the move-to-front heuristic.

Many queueing situations such as computer, communications and emergency systems have the feature that customers may require service from several servers at the same time. They may thus be delayed until the required number of servers is available and servers may be idle when customers are waiting. We consider general server-completion-time distributions and derive approximation methods for the computation of the steady-state distribution of the number of customers in queue as well as the moments of the waiting-time distribution. Extensive computational results are reported.

A single-server queueing system is studied, the input into which consists of the sum of two independent stochastic processes. One of these is an ‘M/G' type input process, the other a much more general process which need not be Markov. There are two types of busy period, depending on which arrival process started the busy period. Stochastic monotonicity results are derived and it is found that under a stationarity-like condition the probability of being in a busy period which started with an ‘M/G' arrival is independent of time and is the same it would be with the ‘M/G' process as only input process. Also, distributional results are obtained for the virtual waiting-time process, and these results are used to reduce the study of a single-server queueing system with as input the sum of independent ‘M/G' and ‘GI/G' input streams to the study of a related GI/G/1 queueing system.

The purpose of this paper is to pave the way for a study of an M/G/1 queueing system with periodic arrivals of additional work, and for optimal scheduling of maintenance processes in certain real-time computer systems.

This paper gives, in the form of Laplace–Stieltjes transforms and generating functions, the joint distribution of the sojourn time and the number of customers in the system at departure for customers in the general M/G/1 queue with processor sharing (M/G/1/PS).

Explicit formulas are given for a number of conditional and unconditional moments, including the variance of the sojourn time of an ‘arbitrary' customer.

A device is subject to damage. The damage occurs randomly in time according to a pure jump process. The device has a threshold and it fails once the damage exceeds the threshold. We show that life distribution properties of the threshold right tail probability are inherited as corresponding properties of the survival probability, under suitable conditions on the parameters of the damage process. Moreover we discuss an optimal replacement problem for such devices.

We study the problem of optimal customer admission to multiserver queues. These queues are assumed to live in an extraneous environment which changes in a semi-Markovian way. Arrivals, service mechanism and random reward/cost structure may all depend on these surroundings. Included as special cases are SM/M/c queues, in particular G/M/c queues, in a random environment. By a direct inductive approach we establish optimality of a generalized control-limit rule depending on the actual environment. Particular emphasis is laid on different applications that show the versatility of the proposed setup.

This paper discusses the asymptotic behavior of the Mt/G/c queue having a Poisson arrival process with a general deterministic intensity. Since traditional equilibrium does not always exist, other notions of asymptotic stability are introduced and investigated. For the periodic case, limit theorems are proved complementing Harrison and Lemoine (1977) and Lemoine (1981).

In this paper the steady-state behaviour of multistate monotone systems of multistate components is considered by applying the theory for stationary and synchronous processes with an embedded point process. After reviewing some general results on stationary availability, stationary interval availability and stationary mean interval performance probabilities, we concentrate on systems with independently working and separately maintained components. For this case an explicit formula is given for the mean time which the system in steady state sojourns in states not below a fixed critical level.

Operator methods are used in this paper to systematically analyze the behavior of the Jackson network. Here, we consider rarely treated issues such as the transient behavior, and arbitrary subnetworks of the total system. By deriving the equations that govern an arbitrary subnetwork, we can see how the mean and variance for the queue length of one node as well as the covariance for two nodes vary in time.

We can estimate the transient behavior by deriving a stochastic upper bound for the joint distribution of the network in terms of a judicious choice of independent M/M/1 queue-length processes. The bound we derive is one that cannot be derived by a sample-path ordering of the two processes. Moreover, we can stochastically bound from below the process for the total number of customers in the network by an M/M/1 system also. These results allow us to approximate the network by the known transient distribution of the M/M/1 queue. The bounds are tight asymptotically for large-time behavior when every node exceeds heavy-traffic conditions.

In this paper we discuss the total service rendered by all the servers in certain loss systems.

An idealized river-channel network is represented by a trivalent planted plane tree, the root of which corresponds to the outlet of the network. A link of the network is any segment between a source and a junction, two successive junctions, or the outlet and a junction. For any x≧0, the width of the network is the number of links with the property that the distance of the downstream junction from the outlet is ≦x, and the distance of the upstream junction to the outlet is > x. Expressions are obtained for the expected width conditioned on N, (N, M), and (N, D), where N is the magnitude, M the order, and D the diameter of the network, under the assumption that the network is drawn from an infinite topologically random population and the link lengths are random.

An analysis is given of the first-come-first-served waiting-time process in stages 1 and 2 of a two-stage service system with k and n parallel service channels in the first and second stages respectively, and m intermediate waiting places (k, n ≧ 1, m ≧ 0).

Although the method of analysis is straightforward the details are intricate and require careful study of the location of the zeros of a high-degree polynomial.

The analysis paves the way for an extensive study of the numerical effect on waiting time of blocking in commonly encountered systems of this nature. ‘Effective service time' in stage 1, defined so as to include blocked time, is considered separately.

Customers enter a pool according to a Poisson process and wait there to be found and processed by a single server. The service times of successive items are independent and have a common general distribution. Successive services are separated by seek phases during which the server searches for the next customer. The search process is Markovian and the probability of locating a customer in (t, t + dt) is proportional to the number of customers in the pool at time t. Various stationary probability distributions for this model are obtained in explicit forms well-suited for numerical computation.

Under the assumption of exponential service times, corresponding results are obtained for the case where customers may escape from the pool.

The model considered in this note has been referred to by Haight (1958), Kingman (1961) and Flatto and McKean (1977) as two queues in parallel. Customers choose the shorter of the two queues which are otherwise independent. This system is known to be inferior to a single queue feeding the two servers, but how much? Some elementary considerations provide a fresh perspective on this awkward boundary-value problem. A procedure is proposed for the solution in the context of finite waiting-room size and some comparisons are made with the single-queue system and an independent two-queue system.