Moran processes are often used to model selection in evolutionary simulations. The updating rule in Moran processes is a birth-death process, i. e., selection according to fitness of an individual to give birth, followed by the death of a random individual. For well-mixed populations with only two strategies this updating rule is known to be equivalent to selecting unfit individuals for death a...

To better understand how to interpret birth-and-death (BD) processes fit to service system data, we investigate the consequences of fitting a BD process to a multi-server queue with a periodic time-varying arrival rate function. We study how this fitted BD process is related to the original queue-length process. If a BD process is fit to a segment of the sample path of the queue-length process,...

We display some representations for the rate of convergence of a birth-death process, which are useful for obtaining upper and lower bounds. The expressions are brought to light by exploiting the spectral representation for the transition probabilities of a birth-death process and results from the theory of orthogonal polynomials.

We present a survey of techniques for analysing the performance of a reservoir which receives and releases fluid at rates which are determined by the state of a background birth-death process. The reservoir is assumed to be infinitely large, but the state space of the modulating birth-death process may be finite or infinite.