How can I create a flow item bin in the form of a shopper for my supermarket simulation? They must be able to randomly select items from the shelves and take it to the tills (processor). I set the source to the shortest queue if available. At the moment the person is only going to the till and moves over the conveyor on the processor. How can I ensure that the shopper unpacks their items onto the conveyor?
Hi @Olga H,
We have a demo model of a supermarket that may give you some ideas. This model uses Process Flow to randomly generate "shopping lists" and then they unload these items at "checkout counters". I suggest using Process Flow for your model. If you have a model you can upload, please do so. We will be happy to look at it and give you some direction.
Hello @tanner.p,
Thank you for your reply. I will try this method and let you know if there are any problems.
Furthermore, I would like to know if you know of any way to show peak times in data. The raw data we collected showed that there are more customers on the weekends. We plan to run our simulation for a week to be able to show this, but how do we enter our raw data so that it would be an accurate representation?
Good day @tanner.p,
We are at a point in the simulation where we are not quite sure how to fix our problems:
Our arrival entity does not look like it is following how we instructed it. I tried to insert peak times and certain percentages to each station. The weekdays are exp(0,96, ..), and the weekends exp(0,42,..), but it does not seem to show.
Secondly, we are not sure how to keep the shopper from going directly to the processor instead of waiting in the queue (seen at the bakery and hot-food station).
Lastly, our tills are the main problem. Tills 1 and 2 are for the first shift and Tills 3 and 4 are for the second. I included them in the shift schedules, but people still seem to wait in those queues when the till is actually not to work yet. We also tried to use conveyors and combiner to show the unpacking and packing but to no success. Our main focus is the processing time though, so if the tills could only work it would be a success.
Your help would be much appreciated. I have attached our model.
I think a good way to do this would be do use a date time source. The date time source relies on a table to generate tokens and you can specify how many tokens fall into each day or hour, depending on how you set it up. My screenshot below shows an example of this. Each arrival block in the calendar can be given a quantity of tokens to create, so if you know that Monday generally has 100-150 customers and Saturday generally has 200-250, you can reflect that here and then simply repeat the schedule weekly.
More on this can be found in the User Manual section on Date Time Sources. Hope this helps give you some direction.
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