[ FlexSim HC 5.3.4 ]
At 0637 hrs in the attached model, 3 IRTechs and one IRRN, assemble at Patient ID1's location as shown in the display attached to this submission. All three occupy 3 of the 4 path nodes that interface with the IR5 location. At 0639, the IRMD arrives and pushes both IRTechs to the remaining unoccupied node so that all three of them occupy that single node. This occurs even if the node capacity is set to 1. I would like all 4 staff members to occupy 4 separate nodes.
Unfortunately, the modeler has little control over the placement of staff at a location. When multiple staff are assigned to a single activity, the modeler has some control by connecting more than one path node to the location, but this only works when all the staff who will be at the location were called by a single activity. Your modeling situation is probably the most difficult to control staff placement because your staff assignments are spread across multiple activities with multiple staff all involving the same location.
I tried lots of different combinations to try and improve the animation. I tried varying the order in which the path nodes were connected to the location, and I tried rearranging the paths so that there were multiple ways to get to the location and multiple paths to take after arriving at the location, and none were as good as the current configuration in the model.
As a final experiment, I removed all but one node connection to the location and then played around with different placements of the node. When only one path node is connected to a location, then the software will randomly offset the staff who arrive at the location to try and keep the staff from all standing on top of each other. It doesn't look too bad with the configuration I chose in the attached model. You can play around with both the placement of the node connected to the location and the node that node is connected to (which changes the angle of the approach to the location) and see a variety of different staff standing arrangements.
Take a look at how I modified the keep/release locks on activities 280 and 320 in the model because the way they were defined was not quite right. I don't think it was affecting anything, but you are not supposed to re-keep a resource that is already kept, and you shouldn't release a resource that wasn't previously kept, so I changed those locks to grey (i.e. do nothing) in those cases.
As a matter of note, we have made some cool changes to the next major release of HC such that the modeler will be able to fully control both the positioning and the posture (standing, sitting, laying, etc.) of both patients and staff for every type of activity!
