Poisson Process - Applications

Applications

The classic example of phenomena well modelled by a Poisson process is deaths due to horse kick in the Prussian army, as shown by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz in 1898. The following examples are also well-modeled by the Poisson process:

• Requests for telephone calls at a switchboard.
• Goals scored in a soccer match.
• Requests for individual documents on a web server.
• Particle emissions due to radioactive decay by an unstable substance. In this case the Poisson process is non-homogeneous in a predictable manner - the emission rate declines as particles are emitted.

In queueing theory, the times of customer/job arrivals at queues are often assumed to be a Poisson process.