Optimize # of Service Counters

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Christian asked Nov 1, '19 Christian commented Nov 4, '19

Optimize # of Service Counters

post-office-example.fsmI'm looking to learn more about the Experimenter & Optimizer package in FlexSim, using the Post Office Model from class.

I'd like to optimize the # of service counters needed to handle the customer arrival rate. I'm thinking my objective would be to minimize the amount of time a customer spends in the Post Office, while also minimizing the amount of money it takes to staff a service counter (let's say $50 per hour).

To do this, I've created a statistics collector to calculate the amount of time a customer spends in the Post Office. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to create a Performance Measure for the Experimenter based off this calculated table.

Any help would be much appreciated, or if you can think of a different way to do this!

Thanks!

Software Version:

FlexSim 19.1.1

optimizer post office

post-office-example.fsm (158.5 KiB)

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.

Answer 1 · 2019-11-04T15:06:15Z

Jordan Johnson answered Nov 4, '19 Christian commented Nov 4, '19

Here is a demo model with what you wanted:

post-office-example-modified.fsm

I changed the Calculated Table to calculate the average time spent in the post office. I added a performance measure to get that value:

Table("CalculatedTable1")[1][1]

I set the service counter variable to be an integer type, with a range from 1 to 10.

I then added two objectives: the time in system, and the number of service counters, minimizing both. I also set the search mode to Pattern, which allows multi-objective search.

Finally, I ran the optimization. The results show the trade-off curve between total time and number of service counters.

post-office-example-modified.fsm (218.9 KiB)

· 1

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.

Christian commented · Nov 04, 2019 at 04:09 PM

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

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