I am trying to use a Date Time Source to generate an order schedule which will end up triggering production work orders. I eventually want to read in some daily order parameters from Excel so I though a Date time Source would be best, but I have been getting some very strange behavior.
First I tried just having one time slot for orders, with the Quantity of tokens created being a distribution. But I kept getting the repeat interval, which I set to "Daily", coming back (on reopening the table) as "Custom: 86400.00". This would be OK if I was using seconds as my time unit, but I am using minutes!
I then decided to generate a daily table and added a few specific arrivals: Qty 1 between 8 and 9am, Qty 2 between 9 and 10, and Qty 5 between 2 and 3pm. (see attached screenshot).
That solved the problem with the repeat interval, but then I noticed I was getting many token arrivals but the clock was still at zero! I renamed the tokens and tracked them: 20 arrivals of "OrderToken1" arrived at time 0 (=8:00am). Then after that the pattern was correct. (The number 20 is not used anywhere in the model, so not sure why it should be exactly that every time we ran it!) Unfortunately I can't send that version to you since my colleague and I made several changes to try and figure it out, and now things have gotten worse and I can't get it back to that behavior!
We tried using the "advanced" option and that seemed to work better, but then when we went back to "table" we noticed the final ending time is 24:00, which should not exist! If you add a row it corrects itself, but now the repeat interval is back to 86400 seconds AND the model has no events until time 58137.77, which (if I was using seconds) would be about 4pm or 16 hours after starting. There are no arrivals at that time! It does, however, run the correct Quantity of arrivals after that point. (Yay!)
Here is the model and a couple screenshots...
