Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
The line reversibility property of a two-stage multiserver system with manufacturing blocking has previously been established using a duality argument between the blocked state and the idle state. In this paper, we provide counterexamples that show this argument does not apply to systems with more than two stages. A focus of this paper is to provide a new proof for the result. Our argument is based on the duality between the service initiation and the service completion events.