A one-dimensional packing approach is used to obtain limiting results for inter-crack distances after multiple fracture of a long brittle-matrix composite with continuous aligned fibres. The results may also be appropriate for applications of the Rényi car-parking model in which there is a reduced probability of cars parking bumper to bumper.

A Markov chain of M/G/1 type, which arose in a problem of communications engineering, is analyzed by a combination of matrix analysis and appropriate series expansions. The highly explicit results obtainable for this model owe much to analytic methods introduced by Professor Takács. Special features of the numerical implementation of the proposed solution are also discussed. The simplifications proper to this model can also be used in some related, more complex models to be discussed elsewhere.

Given a family of Markov chains with a single recurrent class, we present a potential application of Schweitzer's exact formula relating the steady-state probability and fundamental matrices of any two chains in the family. We propose a new policy iteration scheme for Markov decision processes where in contrast to policy iteration, the new criterion for selecting an action ensures the maximal one-step average cost improvement. Its computational complexity and storage requirement are analysed.

In this note, we consider G/G/1 queues with stationary and ergodic inputs. We show that if the service times are independent and identically distributed with unbounded supports, then for a given mean of interarrival times, the number of sequences (distributions) of interarrival times that induce identical distributions on interdeparture times is at most 1. As a direct consequence, among all the G/M/1 queues with stationary and ergodic inputs, the M/M/1 queue is the only queue whose departure process is identically distributed as the input process.

∗ A shorter version of this account has appeared in the Australian Journal of Statistics 36 (1994) 1–8, with major differences in Section 5; in that journal Ted's influence on Australian statistics is stressed, while in this journal we concentrate on his contributions to the Applied Probability Trust.

Events that occur consecutively or simultaneously cause some other event as effect. The latter can be observed with noise, and the problem is to estimate the weights of the causes in the realization of the effect.

Consider a workstation with one server, performing jobs with a service time, Y, having distribution function, G(t). Assume that the station is unreliable, in that it occasionally breaks down. The station is instantaneously repaired, and the server restarts the uncompleted job from the beginning. Let T denote the time it takes to complete each job. If G(t) is exponential with parameter A, then because of the lack-of-memory property of the exponential, P (T > t) = Ḡ(t) =exp(−γt), irrespective of when and how the failures occur. This property also characterizes the exponential distribution.

The transition probabilities of the move-to-front scheme are obtained by exploiting the connection between it and the coupon-collector's problem.

We consider the Mx/G/∞ queue in which customers in a batch belong to k different types, and a customer of type i requires a non-negative service time with general distribution function Bi(s) (1 ≦ i ≦ k). The number of customers in a batch is stochastic. The joint probability generating function of the number of customers of type i being served at a fixed time t > 0 is derived by the method of collective marks.

The continuous autoregressive and minification stationary non-negative time series models discussed by Chernick et al. (1988) are generalized to model marginal distributions which have atoms of mass at zero. The reversibility theorem relating these processes with exponential marginal distributions is extended to the case where the marginal distribution has exponential tail.

We study the scaling limit of random fields which are solutions of a non-linear partial differential equation, known as the Burgers equation, under stochastic initial conditions. These are assumed to be of a non-local shot noise type and driven by a Cox process. Previous work by Bulinskii and Molchanov (1991), Surgailis and Woyczynski (1993a), and Funaki et al. (1994) concentrated on the case of local shot noise data which permitted use of techniques from the theory of random fields with finite range dependence. Those are not available for the non-local case being considered in this paper.

Burgers' equation is known to describe various physical phenomena such as non-linear and shock waves, distribution of self-gravitating matter in the universe, and other flow satisfying conservation laws (see e.g. Woyczynski (1993)).

An example of a simple integrable increasing process, possessing special properties relative to different filtrations, is examined from the point of view of probabilistic potential theory.

The behaviour of the size of the largest complete subgraph contained in an overlap graph of a random acyclic digraph is presented.