Experimenter with parametric arrival schedule and routing probabilities

[campannetta]

Hello everyone,

I’m currently working on a production line simulation and I’m facing several issues with setting up an Experimenter study. I’ll try to explain my setup as clearly as possible.

I built a model of a production line (I’ve attached a simplified version). My goal is to analyze the system under 5 different scenarios, running 10 replications for each scenario (50 runs in total).

The scenarios differ in two aspects: input products and routing probabilities.

Input production mix

I use a Scheduled Source. The arrival sequence is defined via an Import Table from Excel of a file called Arrivals, containing 5 sheets, one for each scenario (each sheet defines the arrival schedule for that specific scenario).

Routing probabilities

The system has 3 stages in series, each with 2 parallel machines and at each stage, parts are routed left/right based on probabilities. These probabilities are stored in another Excel file called Routing (once again the file contains 5 sheets, one per scenario).

Using the Experimenter, I would like to run all 5 scenarios × 10 replications automatically and for each run, automatically save directly to my computer:

- some standard statistics that i have put in a dashboard (e.g., throughput, content of buffer, lead time)

- a table of data generated by the statistics collector i have created

Being the first time i try to do something like this, i am having multiple problems:

1. I am unable to parametrize the scenarios: how can i tell the model to select the correct sheet in Arrivals and in Routing excel files? It would be ok for me also to upload them directly in the model copying them in global tables, but i still wouldn't know how to parametrize them.

2. I am quite new to the experimenter and statistics collector, and i am having an hard time trying to tell the experimenter to save both the build in statistics and the custom ones of the statistics collector

I am sure that this can be an easy task for a more expert user, i hope someone can show me how to manage these two issues. 

Thank you in advance for your help