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wildesy avatar image
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wildesy asked Jason Lightfoot commented

Fill, empty, reuse model

Hi,

Hoping someone can put my on the right path as I’m struggling to figure out a solution currently.


I want to model a situation where on model start there are 200 racks, each with 20 empty crates/boxes on them. These crates are picked up by a transporter in their stack of 20, taken to a loader until all 20 are filled. After being filled they are transported back to any available empty storage rack until an unloader calls for them. Once the unloaded calls for them, they are transported, fully emptied and then returned by to an empty space in the racking.


Essentially the same 200 stack of boxes are removed from storage, filled, placed back into storage, removed and emptied, and then placed back in storage finishing the loop. No source or sink technically exists as the base item exists on startup and is never fully consumed.


Is this something I could model in Flexsim? Note I am very new to Flexsim and struggling to find any comparable examples for reference.

FlexSim 24.0.0
loopingno sinkno source
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Joerg Vogel avatar image Joerg Vogel commented ·
@Wildesy, yes! A logic environment called Process Flow is made for this kind of task. You need not a source or sink object. Process Flow Activities handle your logic for just some rack objects and stations for load and unload actions. But we encourage students to build their own models and ask questions, if they run into problems. If you look closer at this site, you will find many examples, not necessary exactly what you request but they are very similar. And a good advice is, you do some tutorials.
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wildesy avatar image wildesy Joerg Vogel commented ·
Hi Joerg,

Thanks a lot for the quick reply. This was the information I was after, just wanted to make sure this was something I could achieve because everything I had worked through and watched to date had a model that used a sink and source.

I'll check back in with the forum as I progress if I have any more specific questions. This isn't a school project just FYI, this is for my company! Not trying to get easy solutions to homework/an assignment, haha.


Thanks again.


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Jason Lightfoot avatar image Jason Lightfoot ♦♦ commented ·

Hi @wildesy, 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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1 Answer

Jason Lightfoot avatar image
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Jason Lightfoot answered Jason Lightfoot edited

You don't need process flow to create a fixed number of items only at the start of the simulation- you can also model that with a source that has a non-repeating schedule and arrival times of zero seconds. If you don't want those arrivals to appear in any statistics (since they're there at the beginning) then set a warmup time to 1 second (applies to process flow method too).

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