Retrieving items from Drive-In Rack

Question

question

Gregary G asked Jan 24, '20 tannerp answered Jan 24, '20

Retrieving items from Drive-In Rack

Hello there,

I am stuck on how to retrieve items from the drive-in rack.

What I would like to see is:

The rack slot to fill up (one slot back to front)
- Got this to work already in the model
If that rack slot is full, fill up the next available slot
- Got this to work too
Once a rack slot is full, AND has waited 10,000 seconds, empty the rack from front to back. (using the same ASRS 'FingerCar' to load items onto the 'Separator2')

If I need to make multiple racks, that is an acceptable solution as well.

I understand the dwell function acts on each pallet, but not sure how to utilize it properly.

Thank you very much in advance!

palletization.fsm

Software Version:

FlexSim 20.0.0

picking drive-in rack drive in rack palletization

driveinrack.jpg (476.3 KiB)

palletization.fsm (104.4 KiB)

Answer 1 · 2020-01-24T22:54:21Z

tannerp answered Jan 24, '20

Hi @Gregary G,

I'm not super familiar with the new rack style yet, but I'm hoping that this Process Flow that I've added to your model suits your needs. Essentially, it listens to the arrival of the pallets in the rack and then batches the tokens created according to SlotID, which is the slot that the pallets are placed in. After a 10000 second delay, the items are unloaded in reverse order (LIFO). There's some complex stuff going on and I'm not positive that this method is bulletproof, but let me know if you have any questions. The trickiest part is telling the Combiner which of the rack's bays are available so that the bay being unloaded isn't refilled. I did this using a label that's incremented by the Custom Code activities in Process Flow.

Hopefully this helps at least give you some ideas.

palletization-updated.fsm

rack-bay-assignment.png (40.8 KiB)

palletization-updated.fsm (112.2 KiB)

question