Books in the Studies in Probability, Optimization and Statistics series

A survey of work on passage times in stable Markov chains with a discrete state space and a continuous time. A unifying framework is provided by probabilistic potential theory and the results presented in the text are interpreted from this point of view.

The motivation behind the research presented in this book stems from the modelling of stochastic processes occurring in present day research of performance analysis of data handling systems. Coverage includes the one- and two-dimensional random walk, the workload process and fluctuation theory.