How to model warehouse picking ?

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Lexi asked Nov 6, '23 Jason Lightfoot commented Nov 13, '23

How to model warehouse picking ?

Hello Flexsim Community,

I am trying to simulate a warehouse on Flexsim. The model starts with the arrival of pallets full of boxes. The boxes inside each pallet correspond to different clients. Then, the pallets are stored in a rack until an order arrives. Each order is from a different client, meaning that for example, Client 4 would like 10 boxes (but they can only be the boxes that are labeled as Client 4). Therefore, a forklift should go to the racks and do the picking, selecting boxes that only correspond to Client 4.

This means I need to find a way to make a picking process but only of boxes instead of pallets. I looked for tutorials to make this happen, however, I only found information about picking pallets or picking boxes without pallets, but I have not found something about picking only boxes that are inside of pallets. I have tried to do it on the process flow, however, it's not working. I was trying to match the labels of the client on the boxes with the labels of the client on the order.

Does someone maybe know a way I can make it happen or can help me simulate the model, I'll be really thankful. I've been trying a lot but I cannot find the way.

Thank you so much, I'll upload the model just in case so that you can check it, however, its not working at all. I suspect that it is not the right way to do it.

FlexsimModel4.fsm

Software Version:

FlexSim 23.2.0

warehouse order picking

flexsimmodel4.fsm (101.7 KiB)

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Jason Lightfoot ♦♦ commented · Nov 13, 2023 at 02:56 PM

Hi @Lexi, was Jason Lightfoot'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 · 2023-11-06T18:00:01Z

Jason Lightfoot answered Nov 6, '23 Jason Lightfoot edited Nov 8, '23

In essence you will find the pallet containing the items but do not mark it as outbound (unless it will be empty after picking the item and you intend to remove the pallet or will pull the pallet to perform the pick).

Once you have the pallet reference then pick the items from the pallet using pallet.last.

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Lexi commented · Nov 07, 2023 at 01:48 AM

Can someone elaborate more please? I'm new to flexsim and still don't know how to make the logic right. Should I use global lists to implement this idea? Should I have a list of things in the inventory (if so how could I have a list of the boxes and not the pallets in inventory), which command can I use to make the picker understand that I need him to find boxes of a certain client?

Also if I use pallet.last, would I be picking the last object of the pallet? Because I do not need the last one, but the box that corresponds to the desired client depending on the order.
Thanks

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Jason Lightfoot ♦♦ Lexi commented · Nov 08, 2023 at 01:27 PM

You can have a Global List of items where the key word value refers to the item/box. The you can refer to the pallet as value.up and the rack will be value.up.up. If there's a label on the item with customerID then that will be value.customerID. You can add all of these as expressions of a List and pull where the customer field matches the current customer order.

Search this site for warehousing examples if you're unsure of how to implement it.

Virtualization note: Obviously if you have virtualized items this will not work since items pushed to the list will be destroyed and you'll need a reference to the slot item and its subnodes instead - not ideal.

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