Wiley encyclopedia of operations research and management science

Abstract

We review the theory of regenerative processes, which are processes that can be intuitively seen as comprising of i.i.d.\ cycles. Although we focus on the classical definition, we present a more general definition that allows for some form of dependence between two adjacent cycles, and mention two further extensions of the second definition. We mention the connection of regenerative processes to the single-server queue, to multi-server queues and more generally to Harris ergodic Markov chains and processes. In the main theorem, we pay some attention to the conditions under which a limiting distribution exists and provide references that should serve as a starting point for the interested reader.