question

Claire Krupp avatar image
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Claire Krupp asked Braydn T commented

Best way to model people and material flow on multiple floors?

I need to model the traffic flow of the whole plant at a high level, where "loads" arrive and need to be transported (by vehicle or operator), and there are also people moving to and from breaks, lunch, end of shift etc.

The production areas are on two floors, with elevators and stairs linking them. It is a large plant and could have 2000+ people and TEs moving at the same time.

I would like to use AStar navigation but I have read on this site that it is difficult to use it for multiple floors. Maybe I could create a layout drawing that shows both floors side by side? But then how do I deal with linking the elevators and stairs so that the people and vehicles can "jump" from one part of the drawing to the other floor?

Thanks for any suggestions.

FlexSim 19.0.0
network nodesastar navigatorpeople flowtraffic
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1 Answer

Matthew Gillespie avatar image
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Matthew Gillespie answered Matthew Gillespie commented

Yes, if you put the floors next to each other you can use A* as the navigation system. You can use an A* bridge object to handle the points where people move from one drawing to another. This answer shows a simple example of how to do that.

We are currently working on improvements to A* that will allow you to create multiple grids and put the grids at different heights. We're also working on an elevator object that will move people between grids. We're hoping to have these new features done for the 19.1 release around April.

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