How can I use a zone restriction to route a token down a separate path?

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Karan asked Aug 29, '22 Karan commented Aug 30, '22

How can I use a zone restriction to route a token down a separate path?

I have multiple queues that my items can possibly filter into, but the queues are restricted by a maximum total amount of a label.

I have labels attached to my flowitems that I wish to restrict going into each of the queues based on the calculated total of said label. Let's just assume that I have several tokens with labels 1,4,5. My restriction is 6. So I can put 1 and 4 into the one queue restricted by the zone, but then I can't fit the 5 in since it would exceed my max calculated total of 6. But I do have another queue (another zone then) that I would like the 6 token to makes its way into (if available of course). What is the best way to accomplish this task (also think of if there were 3 or many more queues)? Is there a way to probe the calculated total from a zone and use a decide to send that other token down a different path?

Software Version:

FlexSim 22.2.0

zones restrictions

Answer 1 · 2022-08-29T21:22:31Z

Jason Lightfoot answered Aug 29, '22 Karan commented Aug 30, '22

You could put a pull requirement on the queues that looks through the items in the zone and returns 1 if there is space zone capacity for the triggering item and 0 if not. For that you'd need some way to reference the items in the zone - could be by group, by common container or by centerport connections or and array label listing each. I think the quickest and easiest to set up are the group or container.

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Karan commented · Aug 30, 2022 at 01:40 PM

Okay I'm not sure I quite understand how to accomplish that, especially since I want to have operators moving the flowitems not having the queue pull. If you have a mini example or something that would probably set me down the right path. However, wouldn't it be easier if I could probe the calculated total from my zone subset? If my calculated total plus the new value is > my max of 6 then I just route it down a different path right? That seems like a simple formula I could write to accomplish my goal: token.label + zone.subsetcalculationtotal <= 6 go down path 1 and if not go down path 2 (using a Decide in the processflow).

Separately, is it possible to get the calculated value from a subset total calculation during the simulation running? For use elsewhere (not just as a part of a dashboard)?

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Karan Karan commented · Aug 30, 2022 at 03:21 PM

I ended up calling in and Sam helped me out. We found that you could solve this with simply a max wait timer that would kick the token down a different path. We did find that if you want to pull the calculated value from a subset the GUI isn't setup to support that. You have to open the code and add a comma and your calculated name to the end of the line of code to get it to work.

I ended up calling in and Sam helped me out. We found that we could solve this simply by using a max wait timer and kicking the token out a different path. We did find that if I actually want to pull the calculated value from a subset that the GUI isn't setup to support that. I had to manually go into the code and add an additional factor on the end to get it to work.

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