Nigel G Bean, David A Green and Peter G Taylor,
Department of Applied Mathematics,
University of Adelaide,
5005, Australia.
It appears that a finite MAP description for the output process of a stationary non-trivial MAP/PH/1 queue does not exist. In this paper, a family of MAP approximations to the departure process are proposed. These approximations are used as an input process to a second single-server queue to check their viability as tools in network analysis. The stationary distributions for systems analysed in this way are compared with their exact counterparts, obtained by the use of matrix-analytic techniques.