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Maravilhas avatar image
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Maravilhas asked Julie Weller commented

How to make exit points and entry points in mass flow conveyors

Good afternoon.

I have a simulation where I need to add mass flow conveyors to make the transport of my items. The thing is, all the machines depend on the characteristics of the items. How do I make the mass flow conveyor know to what machine the item should go. Also, how do I make entry and exit points to the conveyor? Ideally, there needs to be an exit and an entry point at every machine, since they will wait for the machine to go into the process. If you could give me an example that would be fantastic. All the logic behind the characteristics of the items and the machines are in the machines in the output area.


massflow.fsm
Thank you in advance.

FlexSim 22.0.16
conveyortransportmass flow conveyor
massflow.fsm (190.0 KiB)
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Carter Walch avatar image Carter Walch commented ·
@Maravilhas Mass flow conveyors are meant to simulate the flow of high volumes of flowitems. They are typically used as a visual feature to measure flowitem behavior in mass quantities. As such, mass flow conveyors remove all data on flowitems and are unable to send flowitems based on characteristics. You can do this on a standard conveyor though. Would you like an example?


The documentation on mass flow conveyors can be found here

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Maravilhas avatar image Maravilhas Carter Walch commented ·
Could you provide me the example? I would appreciate that :)

My main objective was only to use it as transport on the ceiling of the machines. That way the path would be more logical and there would be no use for human transportation. Is there a way to make entry/exit points based on the item characteristics with only conveyor?

Thanks in advance!

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Julie Weller avatar image Julie Weller commented ·

Hi @Maravilhas, was one of Jason Lightfoot's or Carter Walch's answers helpful? If so, please click the "Accept" button at the bottom of the one that best answers your question. Or if you still have questions, add a comment and we'll continue the conversation.

If we haven't heard back from you within 3 business days we'll auto-accept an answer, but you can always comment back to reopen your question.

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Carter Walch avatar image
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Carter Walch answered

@Maravilhas like Jason said, the tutorials will demonstrate more in depth how you can use conveyors to sort based flowitems based on labels. In the demo model I attached, I show two examples of sorting with conveyors. The first example showed using the "exit transfer" output port by case and sending items to different ports based on their "Type" label.

1686074045612.png

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In the second example, I use decision points on a conveyor to send item by case with an "On Arrival" trigger. This is how you can direct flowitems to specific locations based on characteristics on the flowitems.1686074162406.png1686074146580.png

As Jason suggested, we recommend going through the conveyor tutorials on more specific ways to solve your problem.

conveyordemo.gif

conveyordemo.fsm


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1686074045612.png (48.6 KiB)
1686074146580.png (25.5 KiB)
1686074162406.png (301.1 KiB)
conveyordemo.gif (2.5 MiB)
conveyordemo.fsm (46.5 KiB)
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Jason Lightfoot avatar image
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Jason Lightfoot answered

As Carter suggests, we don't see why you'd need mass flow conveyors for this - regular conveyor should do the job.

We encourage you to do the conveyor tutorials so that you understand how to use conveyors and to route items to decision points and exit transfers.

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