The following monograph deals with the approximate stochastic behavior of a system consisting of a sequence of servers in series with finite storage between consecutive servers. The methods employ deterministic queueing and diffusion approximations which are valid under conditions in which the storages and the queue lengths are typically large compared with 1. One can disregard the fact that the customer counts must be integer valued and treat the queue as if it were a (stochastic) continuous fluid. In these approximations, it is not necessary to describe the detailed probability distribution...

For many stochastic service systems, service capacities large enough to serve some given customer demand is achieved simply by providing multiple servers of low capacity; for example, toll plazas have many toll collectors, banks have many t- lers, bus lines have many buses, etc. If queueing exists and the typical queue size is large compared with the number n of servers, all servers are kept busy most of the time and the service behaves like some "effective" single server wit: l mean se.- vice time lin times that of an actual server. The behavior of the queueing system can be described, at...