Periodicity of the profile process in Markov manpower systems

This paper presents a new approach and provides a unified treatment to the problem of periodicity of the profile process in Markov manpower systems by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for periodicity on the recruitment distribution and the wastage probabilities. It is shown among others that in the periodic case, recruitment control on the entire system is exercised only through the first cyclic subclass of the state space of the individual level chain. The approach adopted also provides tractable answers to the problems of asymptotic attainability and re-attainability of structures.