Fabric and sheet metal processes seems to look like a continuous flow. In fact the products are very long in relation to their width or thickness. You can think of them as a stream of boxes, where on each box some changes happens:
- A box becomes thinner.
- A box get coated.
- A box is inspected.
- The stream is split between boxes.
- A defect box is cut from the stream.
You won’t get a physical realistic visual realization of the process. You can get approximately a visual look when you let flow boxes on conveyors. For sheet metal processes you can activate bidirectional options.
For sheet metal processes where the thickness changes the box is set to the result thickness before it enters the process section. A draw surrogate object will enhance the thickness to the pre-processed height.
For sheet metal processes that transform the shape you pretend the transformation by an animation without a visible box. The box is set invisible in this section on entry, the process is an animation, on exit the box is set visible again with a changed 3D shape.
You will compute the amount of boxes into length dimensions for the statistic.
A remark: Please don’t set the box length to short. It will only increase the amount of boxes in the model, which has got a direct effect on the performance.
You are building a model that works similar to the flow object library. The continuous flow is cut in ticks of discrete changes.
