A tight bound on the throughput of queueing networks with blocking

In this paper, we present a bounding methodology that allows to compute a tight lower bound on the cycle time of fork--join queueing networks with blocking and with general service time distributions. The methodology relies on two ideas. First, probability masses fitting (PMF) discretizes the service time distributions so that the evolution of the modified network can be modelled by a Markov chain. The PMF discretization is simple: the probability masses on regular intervals are computed and aggregated on a single value in the orresponding interval. Second, we take advantage of the concept of critical path, i.e. the sequence of jobs that covers a sample run. We show that the critical path can be computed with the discretized distributions and that the same sequence of jobs offers a lower bound on the original cycle time. The tightness of the bound is shown on computational experiments. Finally, we discuss the extension to split--and--merge networks and approximate estimations of the cycle time.