This paper presents a new approach to buffer dimensioning for dynamic dataflow implementations. A novel transformation applied to the execution trace graph of a dataflow program is introduced in order to generate an event driven system. It is shown how model predictive control theory techniques can be applied to such a system to analyse the execution space of a dataflow program and to define and to minimize a bounded buffer size configuration that corresponds to a deadlock free execution. Some experimental results obtained using two design examples, i.e. a JPEG and an MPEG HEVC decoder, are reported and compared to the state of the art results in order to show the effectiveness of the introduced approach. © 2014 IEEE.