How to command transporter to pick up specific items in a sequence?

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Thao B asked Jun 17, '19 Thao B commented Jun 19, '19

How to command transporter to pick up specific items in a sequence?

Hi all,

Let's say I have a fixed amount of material allocated to 4 different queues. There are 8 types of material in each queue. How do I command the task executor ( transporter) to pick up materials from random queues in a sequence? For example, The transporter will carry 4 "material one" followed by 3 "material two", then 4 "material three" and 5 "material four" in each sequence, repeating itself.

I have attached an example of the model mentioned. Appreciate greatly if anyone can help me out.

Software Version:

FlexSim 19.1.0

material flow

material-sequence.fsm (29.5 KiB)

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5 |100000

Attachments: Up to 12 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 23.8 MiB each and 47.7 MiB total.

Braydn T commented · Jun 17, 2019 at 05:30 PM

Hey @Thao B

Will there always be those quantities of those materials in each Queue? What should the transporter do if there is less than the required amount of a material when it goes to the Queue? Should it keep going to other Queues until it reaches the amount it is supposed to have? What should the Transporter do if there is no material in the Queue? Should it skip that material type? The best way I can think to do this is in Process flow, with the Queues as a resource that you acquire randomly. Then the Transporter goes to the Queue and loads however many you want of the item type based on the label and what it did last, but you could run into issues if you don't have logic in place for cases like the ones I asked about above.

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Thao B Braydn T commented · Jun 18, 2019 at 01:19 AM

@Braydn T

Thank you for the reply. Yes there will always be a fixed quantity in each queue. To make things simpler, I like to command the transporter to take 2 materials of each type in each sequence (Label 1 first to Label 8 last) and should automatically source for the materials in other queues if it is not available in the current queue. But If there no material left in the queue, the transporter skips that type of material and continues with other materials left.

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Answer 1 · 2019-06-18T17:30:25Z

Braydn T answered Jun 18, '19 Thao B commented Jun 19, '19

Hey @Thao B

Here is an updated model:

material-sequence-process-flow.fsm

In this model I used process flow to look for an item type and then another item of the same type in the same Queue, and then go and pick them up. If there is only 1 of that item type in the Queue, it picks up that one and drops it off. It uses a global variable ItemType, that iterates in the custom code block at the end of the process flow. It selects a random Queue to pick up.
Let me know if this is what you were looking for.

Thanks!

Feel free to @Braydn T if you have more questions.

material-sequence-process-flow.fsm (40.2 KiB)

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5 |100000

Attachments: Up to 12 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 23.8 MiB each and 47.7 MiB total.

Thao B commented · Jun 19, 2019 at 09:12 AM

Hi @Braydn T

Yes, this is what I was looking for. Thank you!

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