question

To be able to control the task distribution more easily, I would build the logic 'the other way around', from the viewpoint of the operators. Instead of the items acquiring an operator to move them, the operators look for items to transport.

That way you can set certain conditions in order for an item to be allowed to be pulled and order the transport tasks by priority.

In the attached model I use an item list to hold all pending items that have to be transported somewhere. They are pushed to the list in the transport reference field of the 'Use Transport' option. (Though you can of course push the to the list in other ways such as triggers or process flow). In addition to the default labels 'destination', 'priority' and 'preempt', the queues/combiners labels 'aisleNum' and 'strict' are also copied to the item. The aisleNum shows which isle the transport task belongs to and is later used to prioritize which items get pulled first by an operator. The 'strict' label will control whether an operator from a different aisle is allowed to pull the item or not.

Each operator also has the 'aisleNum' label which specifies in which aisle they (primarily) work.

The 'strict' value is added as a label field to the list. The 'aisleNum' is used in an expression field that calculates the difference between the item's number and the puller's number.

To control the operator and instanced process flow is used. Each operator thus runs its own version of the process flow and can be referenced as 'current' throughout.

The process flow is quite simple in this case: Each operator pulls items from the list and transports them from their current location to their destination.

In the 'Pull Item' activity the list fields are used to distribute tasks:
- The operator can only pull items that can be transported by anyone (strict == 0) or that belong to their aisle (aisleNumDiff == 0).
- The tasks are ordered first by the priority (so single boxes have priority over full pallets) and then by the aisle difference (so operators will first move all items in their own aisle, then move to the closest one)

ProcessFlow_TaskDistribution_fm.fsm