Proceedings of the 2003 Winter Simulation Conference

An important class of discrete event systems, tandem queueing networks, are considered and formulated as mathematical programming problems where the constraints represent the system dynamics. The dual of the mathe-matical programming formulation is a network flow prob-lem where the longest path equals the makespan of n jobs. This dual network provides an alternative proof of the re-versibility property of tandem queueing networks under communication blocking. The approach extends to other systems.