As stated in my inital post on this topic, I am very exited about the new Mass Flow Conveyor system and I see it having a ton of potential especially in the brewing/soft drink and medicinal industries.
The idea of dispensing with discrete internal flow items and simply treating the obejct flow as a rate of "virtual" objects, will speed up these kinds of models tremendeously and make them much faster to test and build. There are however still a few bugs to work out in the beta and I have some suggestions that I believe would complement the functionality:
1) Maintain virtual flow on MFC output
The exit connectors of the MFC are designed to create flow items, which is good and necessary in some situations, but it would be cool if it was also possible to maintain the rated flow of virtual objects through a station/machine object of sorts and on to the next MFC, such as it would be in a real production line. I imagine having an event, either on the output connector or the MFC itself, that triggers whenever a new 'flow rate change point' hits the end of the conveyor. That way one could control what the maximum virtual output of the conveyor would be and get a notification when it changes.
It would also be necessary to have a feature that limits the output to match the input of the next machine and create starvation if the machine is faster or accumulation on the MFC conveyor if it is slower.
A set of features like this would allow us to maintain the very lightweight virtual flow of objects throughout most of the packaging line, and only create flowitems when we had filled crate or perhaps even a whole pallet. Such a simulation would go from running a 1min per real time second with the current old MFC module and to simulating hours or days per real time second with the new.
2) Color on MFC level bars
The new MFC Flow Units allow us to define visual charateristics of the virtual objects on the MFC which is great. The Level Bars are especially fast to render and give a good indication of the MFC content, but they can only be white. It would be nice if one could set the color and height of the level bars according to product. They also make the photoeyes dificult to see at full accumulation, but that is probably a minor issue.
I hope you will consider adding these features to complete an already exciting product.
Best Regards
Martin
