How to correctly send resources through batching?

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Marzanne asked Jun 3, '19 Joseph Gillespie commented Jun 10, '19

How to correctly send resources through batching?

I've got a model that uses six different of resources- equipment, people, and machinery. Most of these are used for one delay activity and then released (for example, a truck that takes carts from one warehouse to another and is available for use after unload), but one resource (the carts) needs to be maintained throughout the entirety of the system. These carts are used to transport the material from the warehouse, to the dock, and to each of the stops on each route; they are not released until the tuggers have returned to the warehouse. In order to accurately represent the system (anywhere up to six tokens will travel on one tugger, hence the six stops), I am batching the orders using the label BatchQty. All of the batching and the acquiring/releasing of other resources seems to be working fine except for that of the carts, which seem to have a problem after the equipment has returned to the warehouse and I release a BatchQty number of tokens.

Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated! I know I used a lot of words and it may not have made complete sense, but the attached model should make the processes more clear. Thanks in advanced!

01-resourceproblemsolving.fsm

Software Version:

FlexSim 19.0.0

batching resources resource release

01-resourceproblemsolving.fsm (66.9 KiB)

Answer 1 · 2019-06-04T22:54:23Z

Joseph Gillespie answered Jun 4, '19 Joseph Gillespie commented Jun 10, '19

@Marzanne

I noticed two issues going on with your model:

1. When acquiring and releasing resources, you were assigning every resource to the label token.resource. The problem with doing this is that when releasing your resources, FlexSim won't know which resource you want to release. I made a few changes like this in the model:

That way, in the "Release Carts" activity, I could reference token.Cart to release it.

2. There's an odd issue that comes up when you have tokens acquire a resource and then you put the tokens into a batch. What happens is that the batch retains one of the resources while the remainder are lost and become unusable. This is what was happening with your cart resources. A solution I added to your model was to have the tokens that acquired the carts instead run a sub flow that included the rest of your process flow logic. That way, carts are still acquired at the beginning and released at the end, but none are lost due to batching. For more info on the batching problem, see this question: resource release?

Here is your updated model: resourceproblemsolvinganswer.fsm

Hope this helps!

capture5.png (4.6 KiB)

resourceproblemsolvinganswer.fsm (68.3 KiB)

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Marzanne commented · Jun 10, 2019 at 03:57 PM

Joseph,

Thank you so much for your response! The solutions to both of the issues that you recommended were very clear and easy to implement. I was trying my best to manage the different releases with the options for Resource(s) to Release, but I couldnt quite figure it out. My model is running very smoothly now and I was able to improve a few other parts of it with your recommendations, as well. I really appreciate the help!

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Joseph Gillespie Marzanne commented · Jun 10, 2019 at 04:02 PM

Glad to be of help!

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