The morphing of fluid queues into Markov-modulated Brownian motion

Ramaswami showed recently that standard Brownian motion arises as the limit of a family of Markov-modulated linear fluid processes. We pursue this analysis with a fluid approximation for Markov-modulated Brownian motion. Furthermore, we prove that the stationary distribution of a Markov-modulated Brownian motion reflected at zero is the limit from the well-analyzed stationary distribution of approximating linear fluid processes. Key matrices in the limiting stationary distribution are shown to be solutions of a new quadratic equation, and we describe how this equation can be efficiently solved. Our results open the way to the analysis of more complex Markov-modulated processes.Comment: 20 page; the material on p7 (version 1) has been removed, and pp.8-9 replaced by Theorem 2.7 and its short proo

Contributions of plasma physics to chaos and nonlinear dynamics

This topical review focusses on the contributions of plasma physics to chaos and nonlinear dynamics bringing new methods which are or can be used in other scientific domains. It starts with the development of the theory of Hamiltonian chaos, and then deals with order or quasi order, for instance adiabatic and soliton theories. It ends with a shorter account of dissipative and high dimensional Hamiltonian dynamics, and of quantum chaos. Most of these contributions are a spin-off of the research on thermonuclear fusion by magnetic confinement, which started in the fifties. Their presentation is both exhaustive and compact. [15 April 2016

Steady-state simulation of reflected Brownian motion and related stochastic networks

This paper develops the first class of algorithms that enable unbiased estimation of steady-state expectations for multidimensional reflected Brownian motion. In order to explain our ideas, we first consider the case of compound Poisson (possibly Markov modulated) input. In this case, we analyze the complexity of our procedure as the dimension of the network increases and show that, under certain assumptions, the algorithm has polynomial-expected termination time. Our methodology includes procedures that are of interest beyond steady-state simulation and reflected processes. For instance, we use wavelets to construct a piecewise linear function that can be guaranteed to be within $\varepsilon$ distance (deterministic) in the uniform norm to Brownian motion in any compact time interval.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AAP1072 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Componentwise accurate fluid queue computations using doubling algorithms

Markov-modulated fluid queues are popular stochastic processes frequently used for modelling real-life applications. An important performance measure to evaluate in these applications is their steady-state behaviour, which is determined by the stationary density. Computing it requires solving a (nonsymmetric) M-matrix algebraic Riccati equation, and indeed computing the stationary density is the most important application of this class of equations. Xue et al. (Numer Math 120:671–700, 2012) provided a componentwise first-order perturbation analysis of this equation, proving that the solution can be computed to high relative accuracy even in the smallest entries, and suggested several algorithms for computing it. An important step in all proposed algorithms is using so-called triplet representations, which are special representations for M-matrices that allow for a high-accuracy variant of Gaussian elimination, the GTH-like algorithm. However, triplet representations for all the M-matrices needed in the algorithm were not found explicitly. This can lead to an accuracy loss that prevents the algorithms from converging in the componentwise sense. In this paper, we focus on the structured doubling algorithm, the most efficient among the proposed methods in Xue et al., and build upon their results, providing (i) explicit and cancellation-free expressions for the needed triplet representations, allowing the algorithm to be performed in a really cancellation-free fashion; (ii) an algorithm to evaluate the final part of the computation to obtain the stationary density; and (iii) a componentwise error analysis for the resulting algorithm, the first explicit one for this class of algorithms. We also present numerical results to illustrate the accuracy advantage of our method over standard (normwise-accurate) algorithms. © 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg