Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
Characterizations of strong ergodicity for Markov chains using mean visit times have been found by several authors (Huang and Isaacson (1977), Isaacson and Arnold (1978)). In this paper a characterization of uniform strong ergodicity for a continuous-time non-homogeneous Markov chain is given. This extends the characterization, using mean visit times, that was given by Isaacson and Arnold.