I am modeling a system in which I have historical data for the amount of time that it takes a piece of machinery to reach a certain station, which changes depending on the travel distance, traffic, and other variable conditions. I would like to apply the statistical distributions that I have found for these travel durations to time paths, but I'm not sure what the best way to do that is.
How do you want to model the movement of the piece of machinery, or what do you mean by time paths?
Before I started with FlexSim in the past couple months, I used another modeling software called Simio. A time path is one of the objects in Simio, and it allows the user to specify an amount of time between two points instead of a distance. For example, you could connect two objects with a path that is five minutes to travel or an exponentially distributed amount of time to travel, and the token/operator/etc. will take that much time to get there.
I am open to modeling the machinery and the system in different ways, I am really looking for suggestions on how to create the best representation of the system. Ideally I could use the paths for AGV travel, but I don't think you can assign times to these.
In FlexSim you can specify the speed at which you want your machinery/operator to move, and this can factor in the distance between 2 points. For and AGV system, that is more tricky if you have multiple pieces of machinery, but simple for single ones. For network node paths, this is much simpler. So it's up to you which one you want to use. The speeds at which the machinery is going can be changed. If you upload your model or an outline of what you are doing we can help you further.
Thanks for your time and responses, Joshua! My model is going to work with 17 pieces of machinery, and that's just to start (we want to see what happens when we add/remove some). I think that I'm going to need to do some more research on network node paths.
I have a feeling that this isn't the best solution, but with my current knowledge, I have decided to assign the statistical distributions that I have found to be associated with the delivery times to each station to processors and have those processors pull from lists.
I'm going to be working on this model/similar models for at least a few months, so I'll keep you posted on whether or not I find a good way to simulate time paths!
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