Double-stranded DNA molecules can be damaged by enzymic action or radiation, in a manner which creates randomly-located single-stranded breaks (nicks). The accumulation of these leads eventually to the double-stranded breakage of the molecule, because two opposite-strand nicks within a critical distance of each other establish conditions for breakage. We study the random variable N, defined as the number of nicks needed for double-stranded breakage to occur. We develop an asymptotic theory which is needed for practical computations.

Wicksell's problem of unfolding ball size distributions is solved for the case of spherical spaces of curvature K > 0. The well-known formulas for the euclidean case result as limits if K → 0. The paper is completed by a brief discussion of some computer-aided statistical procedures.

We consider a single-server infinite-capacity queueing sysem with Poisson arrivals of customer groups of random size and a general service time distribution, the server of which applies a general exhaustive service vacation policy. We are concerned with the steady-state distribution of the actual waiting time of a customer arriving while the server is active.

An Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process subject to a quadratic killing rate is analyzed. The distribution for the process killing time is derived, generalizing the analogous result for Brownian motion. The derivation involves the use of Hermite polynomials in a spectral expansion.

In this paper a necessary and sufficient condition for the dispersive ordering in dilation sense is given by a convex function which is called the dispersive function and characterizes the distribution function. Some interesting properties of the ordering follow from this result.

For a GI/G/c queue, a full busy period is a period commencing when an arrival finds c − 1 customers in the system and ending when, for the first time after that, a departure leaves behind c − 1 customers in the system. We show that given a full busy period is found to be in progress at a random epoch, the remaining full busy period has the equilibrium distribution. Moreover, we demonstrate that this property is typical for a broad class of stationary random processes.

Direct and simple proofs are given of the equivalence of partial balance over a set of states and the fact that the corresponding equilibrium distribution is insensitive to nominal sojourn time in that set and independent of its past and remaining duration. By a counter-example it is shown that solely insensitivity is not sufficient for partial balance.

Markov process are widely used to model computer systems. De Souza e Silva and Gail [3] calculated numerically the distribution of the cumulative operational time of repairable computer systems modelled by Markovian processes, that is, the distribution of the total time during which the system was in operation over a finite observation period. An extension of their approach is presented here. A closed-form solution is obtained for the distribution of the total time spent in a subset of states of a homogeneous Markov process during a finite observation period, which is theoretically and numerically interesting. We also give an application of this result to a fault-tolerant system.

We consider a consecutive-k-out-of-n system situated in a random environment where shocks occur and cause components to fail with certain probabilities. Under certain reasonable assumptions we compute the moment generating function of the time of failure of the system and the distribution of the number of shocks required to cause failure of the system.

We consider several classical notions of partial orderings among life distributions which have been used to describe ageing properties and tail domination. We show that if a distribution G dominates another distribution F in one of these partial orderings introduced here, and if two moments of G agree with those of F, including the moment that describes this partial ordering, then G = F. This leads to a characterization of the exponential distribution among HNBUE and HNWUE life distribution classes, and thus extends the results of Basu and Bhattacharjee (1984) and rectifies an error in that paper.

A characterization of the exponential distribution was obtained by Grosswald et al. (1980) using the relevation transform introduced by Krakowski (1973). Here we obtain an improved version of the result in Grosswald et al. (1980).

Consider two exponential single-server queues in tandem and suppose that service rates of customer n are λ n and μ n respectively. In this note, a simple and direct proof is given of the fact that the departure process from the tandem queue is statistically unaffected when the service rates are interchanged if λ n – μn is independent of n. The proof is based only on the memoryless property of exponential distributions.

We show that the waiting time in queue and the sojourn time of every customer in the G/G/1 and G/D/c queue are jointly convex in mean interarrival time and mean service time, and also jointly convex in mean interarrival time and service rate. Counterexamples show that this need not be the case, for the GI/GI/c queue or for the D/GI/c queue, for c ≧ 2. Also, we show that the average number of customers in the M/D/c queue is jointly convex in arrival and service rates.

These results are surprising in light of the negative result for the GI/GI/2 queue (Weber (1983)).

In an uncongested transportation network, adding routes and capacity to an existing network must decrease, or at worst not change, the average time individuals require to travel through the network from a source to a destination. Braess (1968) discovered that the same is not true in congested networks. Here we give an example of a queuing network in which added capacity leads to an increase in the mean transit time for everyone. Self-seeking individuals are unable to refrain from using the additional capacity, even though using it leads to deterioration in the mean transit time. This example appears to be the first queuing network to demonstrate the general principle that in non-co-operative games with smooth payoff functions, user-determined equilibria generically deviate from system-optimal equilibria.

Time-reversal arguments can be used to re-derive (and slightly generalize) previous results for sojourn-time distributions in product-form queuing networks.