How to resume conveyor flow on change of label value?

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Claire Krupp asked Jul 1, '22 Felix Möhlmann commented Jul 2, '22

How to resume conveyor flow on change of label value?

I have a large High-Speed Sortation system. We want to manually force a section of conveyor to stop and observe how the system reacts. Then later we want to manually "un-stop" the section and see how the system recovers.

I achieved the first part by setting a label on a decision point, which stops the item when the label is set to 1:

Now I want to make the item resume travel when I set the label back to 0, but when I change the value, nothing happens - I need a trigger that would allow me to tell the item to resume. Perhaps I can use the OnMessage trigger and send a message from somewhere? But where?

I looked at the MTBF/MTTR properties or a User Event, but I don't see a way to cause an event manually.

I also want this to be easy to use so that I could teach my customer how to switch it on and off via a Global Table or maybe a GUI.

Any ideas?

Software Version:

FlexSim 22.1.2

trigger resume item interactive stop manual stop

1656701058348.png (24.6 KiB)

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Answer 1 · 2022-07-01T20:35:44Z

Jason Lightfoot answered Jul 1, '22 Claire Krupp commented Jul 1, '22

You can use a dashboard button and just stop() and resume() the conveyor.

DashboardButton_StopResume.fsm

Or you can place an interactive button in the 3D view and connect it to the object you want to stop/resume.

InteractiveButton.fsm

dashboardbutton-stopresume.fsm (38.6 KiB)

interactivebutton.fsm (51.2 KiB)

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Claire Krupp commented · Jul 01, 2022 at 10:39 PM

Thanks @Jason Lightfoot the dashboard button is exactly what I need. (Though it took me a while to figure out that I had to check the Edit box to look at the code! )

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Answer 2 · 2022-07-01T21:06:08Z

Felix Möhlmann answered Jul 1, '22 Felix Möhlmann commented Jul 2, '22

If you use a tracked variable label, you can listen to its 'On Change' event and resume the item when the value is reset.

However, do not use the 'Automatically Reset' function. It seems to break/overwrite the link to the listening object.

ListenToTrackedVariable.fsm

listentotrackedvariable.fsm (33.9 KiB)

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Claire Krupp commented · Jul 01, 2022 at 10:42 PM

Thanks @Felix Möhlmann this is a nice solution if you want to do it according to a timed pattern, but it would not let me change the value of the label manually, so I could not stop and start the flow on demand. Perhaps I am missing something?

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Felix Möhlmann Claire Krupp commented · Jul 02, 2022 at 07:06 AM

The manual change could be done via code (object.labelName = value) in the script console.

I agree, that Jason's answer is more convenient for this.

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