Prioritizing a Floor storage over another one

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Tahsin asked Mar 30, '23 Jeanette F commented Apr 5, '23

Prioritizing a Floor storage over another one

I have a warehouse where there is designated space for certain types of pallets. After the designated spots fill up, the pallets can be stored wherever is free at random. I tried to simulate this by making 2 floor storage stacked upon each other with one defining the regions using 'paint slot lablels' and the other by setting slot assignment strategy as random. The following happens:

There are blue storage spots that are available which should take priority yet the random assigned floor storage receives some blue, red, and green pallets.

Software Version:

FlexSim 23.0.5

prioritization storage transporting

1680141877650.png (340.8 KiB)

· 1

Jeanette F ♦♦ commented · Apr 05, 2023 at 08:06 PM

Hi @Tahsin, was Felix Möhlmann's answer helpful? If so, please click the "Accept" button at the bottom of their answer. Or if you still have questions, add a comment and we'll continue the conversation.

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Answer 1 · 2023-03-30T06:29:14Z

Felix Möhlmann answered Mar 30, '23

When using the First Available logic with port connections items will generally be send to the first downstream object that accepts them, in the order of the port ranking.

However, when using a task executer to transport the items and when multiple items are released at the same time, this order can change due to timing. While the Use Transport is evaluated the downstream object will not be available to receive another item. So when a batch of items is released, the next item(s) can't be send to the same destination and might go to the 'overflow' storage.

I tried to demonstrate this in the attached model. On the left side the items are released one by one and end it in the correct location. On the right side, the queue is batching them and thus releasing them at the same time. This causes some of the items to go to the fourth storage.

In short, you have to either find a way to never release more than one item at a time to give the connections time to become available again.

Or you have to alter the Send to Port logic to check if a downstream can receive an item and then send it there explicitly. This is also demonstrated in the attached model.

portconnection_timing.fsm

portconnection-timing.fsm (91.5 KiB)

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