What is the best practice in making people act according to time schedule?

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Ryosuke S asked Aug 11, '20 Ryosuke S commented Sep 2, '20

What is the best practice in making people act according to time schedule?

Hello,

I'm trying to create a simulation model to imitate the worker action in my office of one certain day.

It's like,

8AM, arrives at the office and travel to his seat. 8:20, goes to toilet then back to his seat. 9AM goes to meeting room. 10AM, back to his seat. 12PM, goes out for lunch. 1PM, back to his seat. 4PM, leaves office.

I'm using FlexSimHC to create model. There are about 50 employees I want to simulate.

What would be the best practice to create such simulation model?

Should I create globaltable for each employee? Or should I manage all employees schedule in single table? Any advice would be helpful. Thank you.

Software Version:

FlexSim 20.2.0

flexsim 20.2.0 healthcare simulation schedule

Answer 1 · 2020-08-11T17:19:32Z

Benjamin W2 answered Aug 11, '20 Ryosuke S commented Sep 2, '20

Hi @ryosuke.s,

There are a few different ways that you can do this, depending on what you are trying to get out of your model.

How specific is your input? Have you tracked employees and put their data/times into a table and want to run a simulation off of that? If that is the case, a global table would be the way to go. However, if you are trying to populate your table with dummy data for each of your 50 employees, that will get tedious and will not be scalable.

Another way you could do this is using built in delays using statistical distributions to model similar behavior. For example, if you know that employees usually go to the restroom from times on an exponential distribution, then you could model it that way. I would probably have the main person token create a child token which delays for a certain amount of time, then initiates a "going to the restroom" event, or a "meeting" event.

It really depends on what you are trying to get out of the model.

· 6

Ryosuke S commented · Aug 12, 2020 at 02:37 AM

Hello @benjamin.w2,

Thank you for your reply. Each of the 50 employee have their specific schedule. So, I would like each employee to move according to it. The purpose of the simulation is testing Agent feature. How much interaction may occur between the employee, and get the statistics of it. Just like the sample provided from flexsim recently.

So, in my case, should I create globaltable for each employee? Or should I manage 50 employee in one table? If there are any samples managing the people action, it would be very helpful.

Thank you.

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agentplusgraph.jpg (145.3 KiB)

Benjamin W2 Ryosuke S commented · Aug 12, 2020 at 03:21 PM

Can you post an example of what your schedule data looks like?

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Ryosuke S Benjamin W2 commented · Aug 13, 2020 at 12:39 AM

@benjamin.w2, Thank you for your reply. There isn't really any fixed format for schedule data. I can make the format best for the model.

In the beginning, I started with the following. Define the delaytime for each action to run the processflow as in the right.

But in this case, it is annoying to calculate the delay time for each next action. So I was thinking about defining the schedule like below, but I don't know how to create processflow logic suitable for this format.

or

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sche-3.jpg (44.4 KiB)

sche-1.jpg (45.6 KiB)

sche-2.jpg (30.0 KiB)

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