topic Re: How to reverse a circular conveyor ? in FlexSim Forum

How to reverse a circular conveyor ?

1978353512 — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 06:27:57 GMT

[ FlexSim 24.2.2 ]

Hello, Flexsim technical experts. I have a question to ask. There is a circular conveyor belt with multiple pallets on it. By setting the speed of the conveyor belt to a negative value, I aim to reverse multiple pallets simultaneously. However, strange phenomena occur during the reversal, and I don't understand why the result is different from what I expected. I hope you can provide technical support. Thank you! I have attached my model below.

Conveyor_v24.fsm

Re: How to reverse a circular conveyor ?

moehlmann_fe — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:04:16 GMT

Reversing a whole conveyor system like this is not officially supported. The possibility of reversing a conveyor was build with single buffer spurs in mind. Anthony talks a little more about that in the following post.

https://answers.flexsim.com/articles/157629/reversible-conveyors-for-routing.html

So I am sorry to say, but there is currently no way to make this behave as you would expect.

Re: How to reverse a circular conveyor ?

joerg_vogel_HsH — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:25:07 GMT

@FanFan, I think Anthony's answer still persists. But I would also test if you can overcome this restriction by stopping all items. Then I would set negative speed in order of connected conveyors by their rank in model tree or vice versa.

Or I would try to set speed by order of connection sequence in model space. Here I would test this in opposite direction, too. Aditionally I would break up the loop to get a defined end and start of the system. This can be a queue by start as bridge in your loop.

There is also a possibility that doing this all together in a direct sequence of source code, the FlexSim engine is not able to take into account that events have happening correctly. In Process Flow you would add breath delay activities into your logic. In a source code directly, I would call my code reversely by command nodefunction and a structure build of switch by case.