Abstract We consider problems of analysis in three major areas of Civil Engineering, namely: i) Hydraulic Network analysis, specifically, the determination of flow rates and junction pressures in hydraulic networks, when inlet and outlet flow rates or inlet and outlet pressure heads are known. ii) Elastic analysis of pinpointed trusses, specifically, the determination of stresses and strains in the members of pinjointed trusses when deformations or external loads at the joints are known. iii) Traffic network analysis, specifically, the determination of equilibrium traffic flows and link travel costs in highway networks when the origin to destination input flows or origin to destination travel costs are fixed. In this paper we show that each of these problems may be viewed as a (generalized) geometric programming problem. This illustrates the common structure of these problems in a very simple and unified manner and it also provides a mechanism through which the modern theory of mathematical programming ca...