Hi,
I have stumbled upon the problem of not having the possibility to reverse a conveyor direction in a few models I built until now. These conveyors are usually used as buffer positions (often needed for pallet transportation problems). I have been solving this using various different methods suggested on the forums, such as using queues for simple buffer positions, using kinematics, or layering conveyors on top of each other. I'm also against using the legacy conveyor since it doesn't guarantee continuity towards the future. In fact, I was unpleasantly surprised to find out that such a feature was available in the legacy conveyor module, and not in the new one, which is supposed to offer additional features. In the attached model (test-bidirectional-conveyor.fsm) you will find one of the better looking ways of handling the problem. Notice how I made this on the demo version and couldn't even complete it properly due to so many conveyors and DPs being needed, which made me exceed the model limit really fast. I had to stack conveyors, use process flow, conveyor connections, decision points and kinematics to handle the problem decently. Also, stacking conveyors makes it exceedingly more difficult to adapt a conveyor in a model.
None of these methods is user friendly or feels like a proper way of tackling this problem. They all seem like workarounds to me. I have found several posts asking for a good solution but none of these suggest a good way of doing this. Those posts can be found below: Link to Post 1 Link to Post 2 Link to Post 3 Link to Post 4
These posts (I'm sure I can find others as well) prove that this problem is often encoutered by modelers, and is not, as suggested in a reply to Post 3, an 'atypical' feature.
I therefore suggest having a command available in the style of conveyorchangedirection(Conveyor c, "forwards/backwards" or 0/1) or something that suits the new dot syntax better, such as Conveyor.direction = "forwards/backwards" or 0/1.
Many thanks in advance.
Kind regards,
Kaspar
