Note—Extensions of Palm's Theorem: A Review

This note reviews the transient behavior the M/G/∞ queue with nonhomogeneous Poisson or compound Poisson input and nonstationary service distribution. In the case of nonhomogeneous Poisson input, the number of customers in the queueing system over time turns out to have a Poisson distribution. The generality of the nonhomogeneity/nonstationarity assumptions and the ease of use of the resulting Poisson distribution broaden the area of applications for Poisson models. These results have found use in modeling multi-echelon repair systems in situations where the number of arrivals or number in service has a variance-to-mean ratio of unity (the Poisson case) or greater than unity.