Zone Queue Strategy

Question

question

Mason W asked Aug 23, '18 tannerp commented Sep 21, '18

Zone Queue Strategy

Hi all,

I have a question regarding Zone Queue Strategy. In the attached model, I want "Pick List Zone" to order the tokens by the label "SKU". For the most part, this strategy works except for the first token to reach the zone. Since it gets to the zone first it automatically goes through even if its not the lowest SKU coming from the original subflow. Basically, I want to find a way to have the tokens "wait" for all the associated subflow ("Pick List (Orders)") tokens to arrive before the zone executes the zone queue strategy.

Hope this makes sense.

version 18.0.3

sample.fsm

Thanks!

Software Version:

FlexSim (other - please specify)

Software Version:

FlexSim (other)

zones

sample.fsm (399.0 KiB)

· 2

tannerp commented · Aug 23, 2018 at 03:22 PM

Could you try using a batch to collect however many tokens you need before releasing all of them? I wasn't sure where to insert it in your process flow, but here's an image showing what I mean.

0 ·

batch-tokens-sku.png (16.2 KiB)

Mason W tannerp commented · Aug 23, 2018 at 03:55 PM

@Tanner Poulton

That's what I was also thinking, but I can't seem to figure out how to get a batch to function correctly. In the image below, the subflows flow as 1) subflow for number of orders in a pick list 2) subflow for number of line items in each order 3) number of SKU's of each line item associated with an order if looking at the highlighted areas. So maybe I need to add some label at the very first subflow that is associated with that pick list then batch according to that label?

i.e. the first pick list has 4 orders attached to it...place the same label on those 4 tokens. Then another label on the next pick list of 4 orders.

Having a hard time explaining this.

0 ·

screenshot.jpg (39.7 KiB)

Answer 1 · 2018-08-24T16:38:41Z

tannerp answered Aug 24, '18

I tried recreating this and adjusting your model for awhile and the best I've come up with is found in this model: mason-help-tokens.fsm. Note that you'll need to adjust it because it doesn't flow smoothly now, it only grabs the tokens in the correct order.

Perhaps the most important discovery I made was that you had something assigning an SKU to the token that didn't match the SKU assigned to the item previously. I edited the add labels function to simply grab the existing SKU token value here:

This allows the objects to enter the Zone starting with the lowest SKU value, which I believe is what you were hoping for. Prior to this, there were two different labels called SKU and I don't think it could reference the proper one.

mason-help-tokens.fsm (399.3 KiB)

grab-label-from-item.png (21.1 KiB)

question