Pooling (resource management)

Pooling is a resource management term that refers to the grouping together of resources (assets, equipment, personnel, effort, etc.) for the purposes of maximizing advantage and/or minimizing risk to the users. The term is used in many disciplines.

Finance

Pooling is the grouping together of assets, and related strategies for minimizing risk. Debt instruments with similar characteristics, such as mortgages, can be pooled into a new security, for example:

• Asset-backed securities (ABS)
• Mortgage-backed securities (MBS)
• Collateralized debt obligations (CDO)
• Collateralized mortgage obligations (CMO)
• Structured finance
• Collective investment schemes for pooling in relation to investment.
• Securitization
• Intergovernmental risk pool
• Pooling of interests is a merger-accounting method that was taken out of the market in the United States by the Financial Accounting Standards Board on June 30, 2001.

Computing

The resource management concepts of pooling can easily be abstracted and virtualized:

• Memory pooling
• Thread pooling
• Object pooling
• Connection pooling in computer science is a caching technique used to enhance the performance of executing commands on a database.

Equipment

Pooling of equipment is used to maintain "ready for use" equipment while damaged or dirty equipment is repaired and cleaned, by replacing it with an identical piece of equipment from the pool.

See also

• Pool (disambiguation)