Combiner & Separator Using Tables

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Julien L2 asked Nov 22, '19 tannerp commented Nov 26, '19

Combiner & Separator Using Tables

I am currently working on a simulation in the automotive industry. In the picture underneath, you can see the principle I’d like to work with. There are two different types of boxes that fit in a specific tote per type of box. First, these totes are filled in a preassembly zone. Then these totes are picked up by an AGV and later on dropped off at a separator. This represents a final assembly area. Each time a chassis passes on this assembly line a single box needs to be taken from the Assembly_A_FULL queue or the Assembly_B_FULL queue to be placed on the chassis, represented by the sinks. Until a tote is completely empty, I want it to stay their queues. From the moment the last box is taken out of the totes, I want the separator to places these totes in either Assembly_Tote_A or Assembly_Tote_B.

I am currently struggling to get the following logic into my simulation:

The Separator needs to process the boxes in a specific order, which is presented in the table Process_Sequence.
The Combiner needs to process the boxes whenever a tote is available and tote A should be packed at a different speed than tote B, as presented in the table Proces_Time.

A little help would be very much appreciated here :)

principecombinerseparator.fsm

Thanks

Software Version:

FlexSim 19.2.3

combiner separator tables

combinerseparator.png (170.4 KiB)

combinerseparatortables.png (21.4 KiB)

principecombinerseparator.fsm (147.8 KiB)

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Attachments: Up to 12 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 23.8 MiB each and 47.7 MiB total.

Answer 1 · 2019-11-22T22:41:35Z

tannerp answered Nov 22, '19 tannerp commented Nov 26, '19

Hi @Julien L2,

I think we can make this work it we take it one small piece at a time. First, when you say you want the separator to process each item in order, do you mean that the separator will take one tote full of LoadType 2, separate it, and then take one tote full of LoadType 4 and separate that according to the order in the chart? Or do you mean that it will grab one box from each tote in the order listed?

Either way, I recommend using Process Flow to handle this logic.

Second, I added a Type label on the totes that is applied when the totes enter their respective creation queues. When the totes get to the combiner, the combiner reads the table based on the Type label to know what the processing time should be. This should work for this part of your logic.

combiner-logic-updated.fsm

combiner-logic-updated.fsm (146.5 KiB)

combiner-process-time.png (43.0 KiB)

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Attachments: Up to 12 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 23.8 MiB each and 47.7 MiB total.

Julien L2 commented · Nov 23, 2019 at 08:30 AM

Hi @tanner.p, thank you for your help so far.

I want the separator to take one box from each tote according to the table Process_Sequence. So whenever the separator takes a box out of the tote, that doesn't necessarily mean that the tote will be empty.

Further on, in your updated model, the combiner doesn't seem to combine the blue totes with the blue boxes. I was wondering how i could fix this problem?

Thank you!

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tannerp Julien L2 commented · Nov 26, 2019 at 11:13 PM

Hi @Julien L2,

I made some inferences about how the model should run and I ended up creating some Process Flow to handle the logic based on what I think you're wanting to happen. I changed the Combiner and Separator to be Processors because the way things are set up, I'm not sure that the 3D objects have the logic we need. The Processors are controlled using lists and Process Flow.

For the separator, the PF pulls each item from a list that is populated when totes arrive at Assembly_A/B_FULL queues. Once the list is exhausted, the PF moves the totes into the Assembly_Tote_A/B queues to be recycled.

Let me know if this model does what you're looking for and then let me know if you need explanations of any of the techniques I used to create this.

julien-help-2.fsm

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julien-help-2.fsm (162.0 KiB)

pf-separator.png (22.8 KiB)

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