How do I generate a Poisson Process?

Question

Original Question:

I want to generate a Poisson process. If the number of arrivals by time t is N(t) and I have a Poisson distribution with parameter

Answer 1

Generating arrival times via Poisson Process does not mean using a Poisson distribution. It is done by creating an exponential distribution based on the Poisson arrival rate lamda.

In short, you need to generate an exponential distribution with an average = 1/lamda, see the following example:

#include 
#include 
#include 

int
main ()
{
 // seed the RNG
 std::random_device rd; // uniformly-distributed integer random number generator
 std::mt19937 rng (rd ()); // mt19937: Pseudo-random number generation

 double averageArrival = 15;
 double lamda = 1 / averageArrival;
 std::exponential_distribution exp (lamda);

double sumArrivalTimes=0;
double newArrivalTime;


 for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
  {
   newArrivalTime=  exp.operator() (rng); // generates the next random number in the distribution 
   sumArrivalTimes  = sumArrivalTimes + newArrivalTime;  
   std::cout << "newArrivalTime:  " << newArrivalTime  << "    ,sumArrivalTimes:  " << sumArrivalTimes << std::endl;  
  }

}

The result of running this code:

newArrivalTime:  21.6419    ,sumArrivalTimes:  21.6419
newArrivalTime:  1.64205    ,sumArrivalTimes:  23.2839
newArrivalTime:  8.35292    ,sumArrivalTimes:  31.6368
newArrivalTime:  1.82962    ,sumArrivalTimes:  33.4665
newArrivalTime:  34.7628    ,sumArrivalTimes:  68.2292
newArrivalTime:  26.0752    ,sumArrivalTimes:  94.3045
newArrivalTime:  63.4728    ,sumArrivalTimes:  157.777
newArrivalTime:  3.22149    ,sumArrivalTimes:  160.999
newArrivalTime:  1.64637    ,sumArrivalTimes:  162.645
newArrivalTime:  13.8235    ,sumArrivalTimes:  176.469

so, based on your experiment you can either use: newArrivalTime or sumArrivalTimes.

ref: http://www.math.wsu.edu/faculty/genz/416/lect/l05-45.pdf