Parking lot Drive Thru

[reggie_a]

[ FlexSim 19.0.0 ]

I am looking to determine the best route to model the process of a fast food drive through.
Would AGVs be the best route or an item flow with cars as models?

We'd have a route for cars going through the drive through path & parking lots for customers dining in or picking up a take-out order.

[braydn_t · Accepted solution]

@Reggie A
I think we might need a little more information to give you a good recommendation. Are you just trying to model the drive through, or the whole restaurant? Are you trying to see the best layout for the parking lot? Could you give us an idea of what data you will have, and what you are trying to get out of it?

I'll give you a recommendation based on what I think you might be looking for. If you are trying to see the way to get the most people through the drive through in a realistic way, I would use NetworkNodes, and A*. That way they will avoid collisions with each other, and you can have them randomly acquire network nodes for parking spots.

If you could give us a little more detail about exactly what you are trying to accomplish, I would be happy to hep you find a great solution.

[reggie_a]

@Braydn T

Thanks for jumping in to help! Certainly I can give a lot more details here.

We're looking to measure the efficiency of different traffic patterns for the parking lot. We're looking at a 2 lane drive thru that merges into 1, but also having a lane separate for cars parking to go inside the restaurant. Not really looking for simulating the interior processes inside the restaurant, just the traffic patterns for the drive-thru and parking situation.

The data I have access to includes quantities of drive thru orders per hour, average wait time at the order screen, average wait time for drive thru order to be completed, as well as quantities of pick up and dine in orders per hour (to help with cars that will be parking instead of going through the drivethru).

My goal is to compare a few different traffic pattern ideas to help with any bottlenecks in the drive thru or with the complexity of cars needing to navigate around to park.

[braydn_t]

@Reggie A

OK, I think AGV's will be your best bet. It would probably be easiest to use Process Flow to figure out your logic. I would create a source that generates a Task Executor and puts them on the on the AGV path. You can randomly assign a label to the AGV on creation that will determine if its a drive through or pickup order, and which AGV path it will go down. You can utilize AGV parking spots for the pickup parking spots. I would go over the AGV tutorial before you begin, since that will make this part really easy. For the drive through, I would have the AGV's line up at a control point. when they arrive I would create a box, have it go through a processor that you have set up to have a statistical distribution for the processing time. Once its ready it will go into another queue, the AGV picks it up, and heads to the exit. If you have the control point where they "order" be in a different spot that the pickup, then you can split them into 2 lanes simply. Let me know if you have more questions about this!

[reggie_a]

@Braydn T Thanks so much for the guidance here. Will make sure to check out the AGV tutorials as well as task executor/Process flow tutorials.

Thanks again!

[reggie_a]

@Braydn T @Braydn T Just to confirm - using the Process flow with a Task executor on an AGV path, I'd be able to generate as many "cars" (task executors) per hour as my data suggests?

[braydn_t]

Yes, you can. The more I think about it though, I'm leaning more towards using conveyors and boxes- you can change the 3d shape of both of them to work for your model, but in your case the cars of customers are more like flow items than task executors. If you chose to do it this way, you could do almost all of your logic in the 3D model. youd have a source creating boxes, they go into the conveyor, and you can have processors for the wait time they are in a certain spot. This may be a much easier way to go.

[reggie_a]

@Braydn T Good point - I thought about using the conveyors initially but I thought the multi-lane layouts we're planning may prove difficult with that.

Hope maybe an image of the traffic pattern might help?

I figured with AGVs I can model the entrance lane splitting into 2 lanes and after the order is taken on the iPOS (light blue circle) merging back into a 1 lane for the order pickup in the drive-thru. I'm a bit stumped on modeling the process for (in green) vehicles to exit the drive thru in a side lane if they've already picked up their order instead of waiting to get to the front of the line.

Appreciate all the help here 🙂

[braydn_t]

You can use a merge controller to join the conveyors: https://docs.flexsim.com/en/19.2/Reference/3DObjects/Conveyors/MergeController/
do the ones that exit in green order, or is this a call in or online order? You can add a station and have them go down a different conveyor leg based on a label, that you could assign when they "pick up" their order