Bypass a busy conveyor station using decision points

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Elena Haviland asked May 15, '17 Sam Stubbs answered May 15, '17

Bypass a busy conveyor station using decision points

mline-tunnel.fsmI am modeling a series of 5 machines where a single item is being processed. The item will only be processed at a one machine, but it moves on a conveyor like system from the source to machine 1, machine 2...to machine 5 and the sink. An item will be processed at the first available machine and other items need to be able to move past. At the same time, if any of the conveyors between the machines fail, then the no items can move forward.

I don't know how to select a variable or label that can be used to tell the item this station is busy, go to the next available machine/conveyor. I've tried assigning a label to the machine (ie. station) but can't get the decision point to recognize it.

Software Version:

FlexSim 16.0.9

conveyor decision points

mline-tunnel.fsm (62.3 KiB)

Answer 1 · 2017-05-15T13:45:15Z

Sam Stubbs answered May 15, '17

Essentially what you're going to want to do, is set up some labels and On Message triggers to handle this logic. Whenever an item enters or is finished at a station, have it send a message with a parameter of 1 or 0 respectively to your Decision Point upstream.

In the Decision Point's On Message trigger then you could write the following code:

if (msgparam(1)==1) {
		setlabel(current,"redirect",1);
}
if (msgparam(1)==0) {
		setlabel(current,"redirect",0);
}

This will assign a "redirect" label to your DP with either a value of 1 or 0, depending on whether the . Then in the DP's On Arrival trigger, you can have it send the item to the next Station if the redirect label is 1.

In your case with 5 stations, you'll either want to have a series of DP's with the same logic corresponding to each station. Or if it's all on 1 DP you'll need to have different "redirect" labels for each station, and have it check through each of them in your On Arrival trigger.

Here's a simple example to help you out:

redirect.fsm

redirect.fsm (21.2 KiB)

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