Warehousing module - DriveIn model

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Alessio Merlo asked Oct 22, '19 anthony.johnson edited Oct 22, '19

Warehousing module - DriveIn model

Hi community,

I have a simple question: did you already use drive-in rack?

It is a really cool object, but how is it designed? Which is the typical application?

I am not an expert of this complex system and I tried to create a simple model, but I had a lot of troubles.

I would like to model a transporter who loads the box from a conveyor to drive-in and another transporter who unloads the box from the drive-in to conveyor (drivein-example.fsm).

My doubts are:

1. How do I control the access to the aisle?

2. How do I integrate the transporter with different FlexSim navigator? I tested A* and AGV navigator and I was not able to configure them correctly.

Obviously any suggestions from developers ( @anthony.johnson or @jordan.johnson ) are really appreciated. Of course any demo like this (https://answers.flexsim.com/articles/71515/2019-update-2-warehouse-demo.html) could be great!

Thanks to everybody to support me to understand better the new warehousing module!

Software Version:

FlexSim 19.2.2

warehouse drive-in rack

drivein-example.fsm (60.6 KiB)

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Answer 1 · 2019-10-22T16:26:49Z

anthony.johnson answered Oct 22, '19 anthony.johnson edited Oct 22, '19

The logic of the drive-in rack is still somewhat simplistic. The only "custom" logic we've implemented specifically for the drive-in rack at this point are:

We put logic in for properly placing items in the rack, based on whether the rack is a drive-in vs. drive-through rack.
We put logic in for the offset motion of TEs when picking/placing in the rack. TEs will travel first to the entry point of the bay, then travel into the bay. This required an adjustment to the standard way pick/place offset works in TEs (objects can now direct TEs to multiple sequential points as part of the offset operation).

Beyond that, a drive-in rack isn't much different than any of the other rack types. The drive-in rack has no automatic mechanism for mutually excluding access to the bays (if such a feature were added, I don't think it should be exclusive to the drive-in rack). It looks like there are issues right now with using A*, and AGV doesn't allow for offset travel, so it doesn't really work there. I'd like to add more features specifically for A*, and at some point we need to do something generally for offset travel on AGV networks. Anyway, it's a good start I'd say, but there are things that can still be done.

Sorry I don't have great answers at this point. It's a work in progress. We'll probably do some things specifically for A* soon.

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