Something similar to token trace in ProcessFlow for flowitems?

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Axel Kohonen asked Mar 9, '17 Axel Kohonen edited Mar 10, '17

Something similar to token trace in ProcessFlow for flowitems?

Hi,

In ProcessFlow I can use the token trace to get the timestamps for how long the token has been in each of the activities which is handy when debugging and reporting the phase durations.

I would like to do the same for the flowitems in a model, i.e. easily get a report of how long the flowitem was in each of the queues, processors and so on. I know I can get the total TimeInSystem easily, but I have not found a way to get all the partial times without writing a report each time when the flowitem enters/exits a phase.

Is there something similar to the token trace for flowitems or could it be implemented easily?

I understand that it would create a lot of data if you have thousands of flowitems and a complex process, but if it could be enabled/disabled in the same way as the token trace in ProcessFlow one could use it only when it is needed. It does create a lot of data in ProcessFlow as well. And when needed one could easily get great reports without custom coding.

Any clues on this?

Thank you!

Kind regards,

Axel

Software Version:

FlexSim 17.0.1

token trace

Answer 1 · 2017-03-09T16:44:59Z

Matt Long answered Mar 9, '17 Axel Kohonen edited Mar 10, '17

What you're looking for is in the Dashboard, the Item Trace Gantt (under the General section). You can define starting objects as well as Trace Requirements just like tokens in Process Flow.

· 1

Axel Kohonen commented · Mar 10, 2017 at 05:43 AM

Thank you @Matt Long,

This works well for the standard case. I was just thinking that since each tracked flowitem uses three columns and one can only have 16384 columns in Excel the amount of flowitems that can be tracked this way is only 5461 for each Item Trace Gant chart that exists in the model. This is not very much if one has a model with many flowitems or one runs the model for a longer time.

So is there any good way of circumventing this, i.e. getting FlexSim to write each flowitem on the rows and the phases in the columns so that one could fit much more data into Excel? This would allow for one million flowitems which should be more than enough in most cases.

Or does one need to create custom reports in models with larger amounts of flowitems?

If one does not need to track the exact flowitems one can of course get the staytime raw data for each of the items in the tracked objects using the Staytime Dashboard (Process Flow category).

Thank you!

Kind regards,

Axel

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