Construction of continuous time Markovian arrival processes

Abstract

Markovian arrival processes were introduced by Neuts in 1979 (Neuts 1979) and have been used extensively in the stochastic modeling of queueing, inventory, reliability, risk, and telecommunications systems. In this paper, we introduce a constructive approach to define continuous time Markovian arrival processes. The construction is based on Poisson processes, and is simple and intuitive. Such a construction makes it easy to interpret the parameters of Markovian arrival processes. The construction also makes it possible to establish rigorously basic equations, such as Kolmogorov differential equations, for Markovian arrival processes, using only elementary properties of exponential distributions and Poisson processes. In addition, the approach can be used to construct continuous time Markov chains with a finite number of states