question

Sanjay R avatar image
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Sanjay R asked tannerp commented

Stations on non accumulating conveyor

I am building a non accumulating conveyor with stations at intervals

The problem I am facing is that even though the work items are at the station locations, one station waits for the other station to finish processing . So lets instead on working for the process time and moving forward, now the conveyor is moving forward after no.of stations*process time

Anybody got any idea, what is causing this?

NB: I am an absolute beginner trying to use flex sim for the firs time

FlexSim 19.0.9
conveyorflexsim 19.0.9
capture.png (54.3 KiB)
test.fsm (1.7 MiB)
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tannerp avatar image tannerp commented ·

Hi @Sanjay R, was my answer helpful? If so, please click the red "Accept" button on the answer. Otherwise, feel free to comment back with more information. Thanks!

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1 Answer

tannerp avatar image
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tannerp answered tannerp commented

As far as I can tell, your model is working correctly in that each conveyor station must stop the conveyor individually. This means that only one station can actively stop the conveyor and as soon as it does, all other stations are "blocked" and unable to process.

If you want the stations to process independently at the same time, you can change the conveyor type to accumulating, but this may go against what you're trying to do.

Depending on what you want to process, you might consider only using one station and then putting Decision Points along the rest of the conveyor at proper intervals. The Decision Points can handle "processing" the items at each step, but will rely on the initial station for the processing time.

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Sanjay R avatar image Sanjay R commented ·

Thanks for the response @tanner.p. I am now how the conveyor-station behaves in this case.

Unfortunately your method of using decision point does not quite work for me as I have different process times based on model type for each station & station breakdown details.Using stations in each location is the only way I can think including all the parameters.(The model I attached here is a test model I created to explain the problem)

Any workable ideas to arrive at the above scenario will be highly appreciated.

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tannerp avatar image tannerp Sanjay R commented ·

@Sanjay R,

Another user expressed a similar concern. Thanks for clarifying your process. Let me explain how we can work with this by quoting from my answer to this question.

"At each Station, you can still calculate a Process Time, but instead of adding it as the Processing Time value, add it as a label to the item and push the item to a list. Then, in Process Flow, pull all the items at the stations from the list, calculate which of the processing times is longest, and delay the conveyor for that amount of time. That way, you're simulating the process correctly."

Let me know if this method works for you.

non-accumulating-conveyor_1.fsm

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