question

Kari Payton avatar image
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Kari Payton asked Kari Payton commented

Utilize two cranes at once.

Hi,

I have a small crane-flow.fsm

model with the flow for two cranes referenced by a resource in process flow. I wanted the cranes to travel together, load, and unload an item. It seems to work fine on the first crane. However, I am having an issue with the states on the second crane. The dashboard shows the second crane as idle the entire time. Any idea what I am missing?

FlexSim 17.0.3
cranes
crane-flow.fsm (31.7 KiB)
5 |100000

Up to 12 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 23.8 MiB each and 47.7 MiB total.

1 Answer

Matt Long avatar image
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Matt Long answered Kari Payton commented

There are some subtleties when using the crane. First it's important to understand that the Crane does not travel like other objects like the Operator or Forklift. The crane uses offset travel to move. You'll notice that your cranes never spend anytime in their Travel tasks because these have no affect on the crane. Instead you need to use the Travel to Loc activity.

I'm not entirely sure why setting the state of the crane doesn't work, however, it often is the case that manually setting states of objects does not work due to them managing their own states. Because of this, I changed the setstate activities to use a Custom Task activity that is set to the Wait for Task type. This gives you the option to set the state on the object and it will ensure that no new task sequences can be started. The crane will wait in that state until a new task is added to the end of its active task sequence. Because I have to be adding tasks to the actual task sequence, I also had to add a Create TS activity to the beginning of the 2nd crane's set of tasks.

At the very end I have one final task activity that is a delay with 0 time that then sets the state of the crane back to idle.

See the attached model. 6130-crane-flow.fsm


6130-crane-flow.fsm (33.1 KiB)
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Up to 12 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 23.8 MiB each and 47.7 MiB total.

Kari Payton avatar image Kari Payton commented ·

Thanks @Matt Long that works well!

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