Hello,
I am new to flexsim and I am still trying to figure out things.
My model has a conveyor and different items (let say X and Y).
Imagine at the end of the conveyor are the following elements: X X Y X X. As currently is, my operator is picking up the first element to arrive to the end of the conveyor. Is there any way to make the operator to select which item to pick? Would be nice if the operator could be decide that using an parameter since my idea is to do an RL connector.
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I'd suggest to use a list for this. First, increase the size of the exit transfer on the conveyor so can 'hold' more than one item.
Then create a global list and set the exit transfer to push items to that list in the 'Send To Port' option.
By adding 'fields' to the list you can then use a query when pulling from the list to filter and/or sort the items on the list. In the attached example, each item is assigned a 'prio' label between 0 and 10. Items with a higher priority are pulled first.
I use a process flow to control the operator. But you can also use the 'Pull Strategy' input option of fixed resources to pull from the list directly. (Note though, that a queue will pull items up to its maximum capacity when available. So it would pull all items as soon as they enter the exit transfer region, as long as it has capacity)
More information as well as a tutorial about lists can be found in the online manual.
https://docs.flexsim.com/en/22.1/ConnectingFlows/Lists/KeyConceptsLists/KeyConceptsLists.html
Is it possible to make the operator to pull by an item type given by an action parameter?
Something like this would it be possible?
For example, doing this gives an exception of invalid SQL query
WHERE Type=Model.parameters.SelectItemType ORDER BY ageInQueue DESC
You can, but you have to enclose the FlexScript expression (Model.parameters.SelectItemType) in curly braces {}.
Alternatetively, you could first write that parameter value to a label on the token and use that label in the query (puller.labelName).
Or you could create a dynamic expression field for the list that checks if the entry matches the parameter. The expression would either evaluate to 0 (false) or 1 (true).
Thank you very much! That was exactly what I was looking for.
There's a new question that came into my mind. If the query WHERE Type = {Model.parameters.SelectedItemType} ORDER BY ageInQueue DESC results in empty, is there any way to introduce an "else" query?
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