We investigate a class of exponentially weakly ergodic inhomogeneous birth and death processes. We consider special transformations of the reduced intensity matrix of the process and obtain uniform (in time) error bounds of truncations. Our approach also guarantees that we can find limiting characteristics approximately with an arbitrarily fixed error. As an example, we obtain the respective bounds of the truncation error for an M_t/M_t/S queue for any number of servers S. Arbitrary intensity functions instead of periodic ones can be considered in the same manner.

This paper is largely a review. It considers two main methods used to study stability and to obtain appropriate quantitative estimates of perturbations of (inhomogeneous) Markov chains with continuous time and a finite or countable state space. An approach is described to the construction of perturbation estimates for the main five classes of such chains associated with queuing models. Several specific models are considered for which the limit characteristics and perturbation bounds for admissible “perturbed” processes are calculated.

The problem considered is the computation of the (limiting) time-dependent performance characteristics of one-dimensional continuous-time Markov chains with discrete state space and time varying intensities. Numerical solution techniques can benefit from methods providing ergodicity bounds because the latter can indicate how to choose the position and the length of the “distant time interval” (in the periodic case) on which the solution has to be computed. They can also be helpful whenever the state space truncation is required. In this paper one such analytic method—the logarithmic norm method—is being reviewed. Its applicability is shown within the queueing theory context with three examples: the classical time-varying $M/M/2$ queue; the time-varying single-server Markovian system with bulk arrivals, queue skipping policy and catastrophes; and the time-varying Markovian bulk-arrival and bulk-service system with state-dependent control. In each case it is shown whether and how the bounds on the rate of convergence can be obtained. Numerical examples are provided.

In this paper we present a method for the computation of convergence bounds for four classes of multiserver queueing systems, described by inhomogeneous Markov chains. Specifically, we consider an inhomogeneous M/M/S queueing system with possible state-dependent arrival and service intensities, and additionally possible batch arrivals and batch service. A unified approach based on a logarithmic norm of linear operators for obtaining sharp upper and lower bounds on the rate of convergence and corresponding sharp perturbation bounds is described. As a side effect, we show, by virtue of numerical examples, that the approach based on a logarithmic norm can also be used to approximate limiting characteristics (the idle probability and the mean number of customers in the system) of the systems considered with a given approximation error.