Limit the number of flow items in a group?

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Jason Merschat asked Jun 08 2017 at 12:17 PM Joerg Vogel answered Jul 30 2018 at 5:00 PM

Limit the number of flow items in a group?

I have a department that has 14 processors and 3 operators. Each operator can manage 3 processors each totaling 9 processors of the 14 available. How do I model this given that any machine can process a flow item? I am thinking I can either:

Limit the number of flow items into the processor group to 9 and uncheck the "Use Operator for Process". This would manage the the flow item constraint, but would not give me any manpower analytics - I am not sure how to accomplish this using Groups...
Allow each Operator to simultaneously manage 3 processors. This would be Ideal but that I am not sure how to do this either as the Processors do not allow use of a fractional part of an operator in the "Number of Operators" Field

Modeling note: I am using Lists and pulling to a Queue upstream of the Processor Group

I appreciate any insights.

Best regards,

Jason

Software Version:

FlexSim 17.1.2

processors groups operators assignment constraints

· 1

Answer 1 · 2017-06-14T06:58:11Z

Joerg Vogel answered Jun 14 2017 at 6:58 AM

I think an operator is the unit that manages three resources. The operator isn't necessary at every single processor which he has acquired. In the 3D I would build a processor which has got a capacity of three and then activate the option use an operator for processing. This is my controlling sub model. Then when an item enters this processor I duplicate the item and move it to one of the 14 available processors. In this manner I get a correct statistic for the three operators and for all 14 processors. You can build this with ProcessFlow, too, if you find an activity that excepts a limit of three tokens at all and acquires a resource when the zone inhabits at least one token.

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