This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review on Markovian arrival processes (MAPs),
which constitute a rich class of point processes used extensively in stochastic modelling. Our
starting point is the versatile process introduced by Neuts (1979) which, under some simplified
notation, was coined as the batch Markovian arrival process (BMAP). On the one hand, a general
point process can be approximated by appropriate MAPs and, on the other hand, the MAPs
provide a versatile, yet tractable option for modelling a bursty flow by preserving the Markovian
formalism. While a number of well-known arrival processes are subsumed under a BMAP as
special cases, the literature also shows generalizations to model arrival streams with marks, nonhomogeneous
settings or even spatial arrivals. We survey on the main aspects of the BMAP,
discuss on some of its variants and generalizations, and give a few new results in the context of a
recent state-dependent extension.Peer Reviewe