We study a system with heterogeneous parallel servers, each with an infinite waiting room. Upon arrival, a job is routed to the queue of one of the servers. The objective is to find the routing policy that best utilizes the available state information to minimize the expected stationary queue...

Stochastic processing networks (SPN) are, in general, difficult objects to study analytically. The diffusion approximation refers to using the stationary distribution of the diffusion limit as an approximation of the diffusion-scaled process (say, the workload) in the original SPN. To validate...

This note presents an initial assessment of the impacts of the recent financial crisis which peaked in late 2008 on banks’ ship financing practices. A survey of banks with a shipping division in Hong Kong suggests that banks reduced their lending to shipping after the financial crisis. Banks...