Idea

Joerg Vogel avatar image
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Joerg Vogel suggested Matthew Gillespie commented

Sankey Diagramm

A Sankey diagram is a chart showing the amount of the material flowing in a model. The chart should be turned on and off as a layer over the existing model. Maybe the layer has as an option as a 2D or 3D output. You can find a first start here. The arrows should be in rectangular fashion. In a 3D variant the arrows get beside a amount driven width a height, too.

chartsankey diagramstatistic
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Michael Machado avatar image Michael Machado commented ·

Also, Ben Wilson did a great demo to us 3 years ago on how to set the Sankey Diagramm inside FlexSim. It's 5 amazing and heavy videos on how to do that.

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Ben Wilson avatar image
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Ben Wilson commented

FlexSim's dashboards offer several built in graph types to easily visualize your data, including dot plots, line charts, bar charts, pie charts, and histograms. Those chart types cover the basics, but don't come close to scratching the surface of all possible chart types.

A Sankey Diagram is just one of an infinite number of ways to display your data. FlexSim couldn't possibly program every single possible custom graph type to satisfy the universe of needs that our customers may have.

Luckily, FlexSim excels not only as a simulation software, but is a pretty good development platform in its own right. FlexSim has all the built in flexibility to allow the enterprising user to do just about anything.

One of our worst kept secrets is that FlexSim includes a fully fledged web renderer that we use to display various aspects of FlexSim, including dashboards, the user manual, the start page, and more. The great thing about having a web renderer is that anything that you can see on a webpage could be incorporated into FlexSim.

As @michael.machado mentioned, I did a video series several years ago showing how a Sankey Diagram could be incorporated into a FlexSim model. It is not very polished, not scripted, quite long (almost 2 hours altogether), and you have to be comfortable not only with FlexSim, but also with web technologies. This isn't really mass market kind of material.

That said, this old video series shows the framework that could be followed to incorporate any sort of data visualization into your FlexSim simulation model. I'm sure this thrown-together example could be polished by someone who has actually learned the D3 javascript library and would be able to streamline this example and optimize communication between FlexSim and the diagram.

If you find that you need data visualization but don't feel comfortable doing a custom graph on your own, feel free to contact our services group. This is definitely a service you can purchase from us.

At any rate, here are the 5 videos. They are a bit old (but not out-of-date). They are long. They are by no means 'basic'. You have been warned :)

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Joerg Vogel avatar image Joerg Vogel commented ·

Yes, that looks like a version of a Sankey diagram, but it is still a seperate chart. I am looking for a chart similar to the heat map by @Carsten Seehafer and such chart should be turned on and off. The heat map shows the frequent use of paths the taskexecuters do. But that works only for the transport of items with taskexecuters. It is great module. I am looking for more general approach and more abstract visual representation of the amount of flowitems going the same process or material flow.The direct link with splines is a start but in the end it should uses rectangular paths of the amount arrows in the Sankey diagram.

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Carsten Seehafer avatar image Carsten Seehafer Joerg Vogel commented ·

Just a small hint: The heat map module can also track flowitems, but you have to add and remove those flowitems by command. It should be in the documentation of the module (or at least in the description of the module commands). :-) Greetings from Bremen

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Matthew Gillespie avatar image
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Matthew Gillespie commented

This feature is now available in the 18.2 beta

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Jordan Johnson avatar image
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Jordan Johnson commented Jordan Johnson edited

You could use the Module SDK (found here) to accomplish this task. You can use the Mesh class to create a custom 3D-drawable object, that changes shape as the model runs.

Once you clone the repository linked above, you can read the included documentation on how to develop a module. If you make this as a module, it will be easily shareable. In addition, you will be able to use Visual Studio's intellisense and autocomplete features.

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