Issues with Process Analysis Tool

[Anonymous]

I have found that I do not know how to use several features in the Process Control tool or the program is bugged. Any assistance on these issues would be greatly appreciated.

The first issue I have is with the "variability" settings. First, the program is very unclear about the exact function of the variability tool. To figure out what it did I made a workspace with just a source object and product object. I set the source to produce entities at 100/hr, set the simulation duration time to be an hour, and took sample at different variabilities. At variability % 25, 50, 75, and 100 the mean entities produced over the hour span reduced to 99, 97, 92, and 85 and the standard deviations were 0.8, 2.1, 3.4 and 7.1. Changing the simulations from normal to uniform had no impact on the results. Could someone could help me understand what the "variability" setting is specifically doing?

The next issue I have had is with processor failures. Whenever a processor has a failure, for the rest of the simulation the processing time in the processor becomes the MTTR. If this is not a bug I do not understand what mistake I am making. If this is a bug, I wanted to check to see if this is a known issue.

The next issue I have run into is with the "sequential" toggle in processor object settings. When the "sequential" toggle is on, every operation in the processor object aside from the last operation has its output port removed. If this is a feature I am unsure of the purpose or how to use it.

I also wanted to ask how operator objects prioritize going to processor objects when multiple processes are ready to start.

Ellis Johnson

[liqinomickey]

Hi @Anonymous 

Variability is a statistic value. If variability is not 0%, the "processing time" or "output rate" will follow a standard diviation. For the exact meaning of variability. Let me look it up and get back to you.

Pocessor will fail after it has processed for a certain amout of time, (MTBF, exact value if variability is 0%). And after MTTR of time, it will be repaired and back on line. Are you seeing the process never comes back on line? Would you please share the adskfpa file and I can take a look.

Sequential means all the operations in this process will be processed sequentially before it could take in another raw material. Once upon a time, the sequentialed process only has 1 inlet and 1 outlet. But later, we received customer request that in operation 2, it will take in another raw material and perform a merge operation. So we added the inlet for operation 2 and so on. If you don't have this request, certianly leave the inlet of operation 2 open. 

Operator doesn't have a priority setting available yet. It will come to the nearest one.