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Andrea F avatar image
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Andrea F asked Andrea F commented

Debugging problem with warehouse model

Hello everyone i am stuck within my model. I would like to debug a problem that keeps occurring in the take another Pallet From Rack block. The model represents some activities of a picking of different panels stacked on the floor storage. There are two phases of picking activities:

1. First phase the transporter retrieve the pallet from the rack according to the product type required by an OrdersTable imported from excel.

2. Second phase an operator is building the order according to the quantity of items required by the OrdersTable, retrieving the single items from the pallet retrieved by the transporter

The process is repeated through a loop iterating over the columns and rows of the OrdersTable. The rows of Table represent the different orders happening in different days, instead the columns represent the type of panels (Length) required by one order.


The loop is working properly, i have just one problem in case the pallet retrieved finishes the items on the pallet and the operator has to still finish to compose the order (the quantity of items required for each type is given by the intersection between rows and columns of the OrdersTable). In this case i created another block "Take another Pallet from Rack" that get another pallet of the same type from the rack so that the operator can continue the Compose Order activity.The problem is that FlexSim throw some exceptions manly due to the inability to retrieve the item from the list.

Does anyone know how to fix this problem and properly debug the model?

sarner-holz-final-floor-1-jf-2.fsm


FlexSim 19.1.2
warehouseflexsim 19.1.2logisticswarehouse optimization model
5 |100000

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1 Answer

Felix Möhlmann avatar image
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Felix Möhlmann answered Andrea F commented

Each time your are re-stacking pallets to get to a pallet below them you add them to the list of pallets when they re-enter the racks. In effect, once a pallet is empty and deleted by the sink, it might still be on the list several times. But with the item deleted the "PalletType" field can no longer be evaluated leading to the error messages.

To circumvent this I add a label "DontAdd" to the removed pallets and only add pallets to the list that don't have that label in the "push to itemlist" section of the process flow. If they do have the label at that point I remove it again to "reset their status".

The model now runs fine for me until it runs out of parts with length 210.

I also added an additional field containing the cell rank of the pallet to the itemlist. That way you can query for the pallet with the highest cell rank, reducing the amount of necessary re-stacking.

sarner-holz-final-floor-1-jf-2-fm.fsm


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Andrea F avatar image Andrea F commented ·

Thank you @Felix Möhlmann for the precious help now the model is working fine. Regarding the stoppage at parts with length 210 do i have to add more stock with that length?

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Felix Möhlmann avatar image Felix Möhlmann Andrea F commented ·
Depending on what the goal of the model is. I just reported what I saw once the errors were fixed. Other stock was still pretty full at the time.
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Andrea F avatar image Andrea F Felix Möhlmann commented ·
The aim is to get statistics on the picking operations and the different time spent on different state by the transporter. So better if the flow of picking is iterating until the end of the table. Maybe i can just increase the number of panels of length 210
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