Creating a pick list by appending two arrays

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Niket M asked Dec 11, '22 Niket M commented Dec 12, '22

Creating a pick list by appending two arrays

Hi fellow users,

I am working on a warehouse model. For picking, an operator gets a pre-loaded cart with orders and then they begin the pick path. I am trying to create the same logic by using process flows, I've used some ideas from the "warehouse model", however, I am not able to figure out how to assign the pick locations for each line to the same array so that I can start the pick sequence.

In this model, I tried batching the tokens for the orders but when I append the arrays from the tokens, it makes a new array with nested values which is not what I want.

Any help will be appreciated, thank you.

pick_list_question.fsm

Software Version:

FlexSim 22.2.2

warehouse

pick-list-question.fsm (1.3 MiB)

Answer 1 · 2022-12-11T14:35:39Z

Jason Lightfoot answered Dec 11, '22 Niket M commented Dec 12, '22

I would push both arrays to a list and then pull all the values ordering by bay, aisle etc so that you have the correct sequence.

Appending array a1 to a2 can be this:

while(a1.length)
    a2.push(a1.pop());

which will reverse a1 while appending, or simply:

a2.append(a1);

· 9

Niket M commented · Dec 12, 2022 at 03:05 AM

Thank you Jason. I will give this a shot. However, I am wondering how to query based on the bay, aisle, level order because the array values written in the list are string. Do I need to write aisle, bay, level all the values separately in the list while pushing the tokens?

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Joerg Vogel Niket M commented · Dec 12, 2022 at 09:50 AM

@Niket M , perhaps you can evaluate the slot value in Warehouse system to get a desired order for picking.

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Jason Lightfoot ♦ Niket M commented · Dec 12, 2022 at 10:34 AM

If you had an array of items or slot items then you can add labels to them or use an expression for those and the ORDER BY AisleID, BayID, SlotID in the pull.

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Niket M commented · Dec 12, 2022 at 09:27 PM

@Jason Lightfoot or @Joerg Vogel - Logic of pushing the token.Items (array containing slot location) is working and it's pushing a slot string to the list. Do I need to parse the bay and level numbers from this string to pull using ORDER BY query? I am assuming there's some Flexscript to do this faster than writing a code to read string and strip from it. Here is what I was trying but it's not working.
If I write an expression to save bay and level info in the list, I think the logic will work. However, I was also thinking that if I use A* as my network, this "pull" logic will over-ride any distance optimization it can do, because, now I am evaluating the next pick by purely using a pull query. Is that correct?

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1670880274885.png (5.8 KiB)

Jason Lightfoot ♦ Niket M commented · Dec 12, 2022 at 09:36 PM

Push the actual slot/slot item pointer and then you can use expressions like:

value.as(Storage.Slot).BayID

Here's an example:

slotItemsArrayToListForSort_jl.fsm

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slotitemsarraytolistforsort-jl.fsm (75.3 KiB)

Niket M Jason Lightfoot ♦ commented · Dec 12, 2022 at 10:42 PM

@Jason Lightfoot - I think I got it but just to make sure I am doing correctly. Can you attach the model in 22.1 version? I am on the older one so cannot open your attachment.

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Answer 2 · 2022-12-12T21:03:10Z

Joerg Vogel answered Dec 12, '22 Niket M commented Dec 12, '22

You can try method concat of Flexscript API.

Edit: Example shows concatenation of an explicit literal array. This works with a reference by array variable, too.

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Joerg Vogel commented · Dec 12, 2022 at 09:13 PM

@Niket M , please take a look at querying an array to order filter it.

By Query clause ARRAY_AGG(row attribute) you can get an ordered or filtered array as a result for cell [1][1].

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Niket M Joerg Vogel commented · Dec 12, 2022 at 11:06 PM

I wasn't aware that I could directly query an array. This is very helpful to know. Thank you @Joerg Vogel

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