Semi-truck drivers exiting truck at parking lot

[dustin_s]

Hi, in my simulation I have trucks pulling into a parking lot and delaying (a check-in period). I was wondering if there is a way to make a driver exit the vehicle and walk to a kiosk. If anybody could describe a simple way to do this that would be great.

Thanks!

[regan_blackett · Accepted solution]

If you are comfortable with a Process Flow heavy approach, I would do it that way. See my attached model for an simple version of what you have described.

In my 3d model you will notice I have a Queue acting as an origin for the Trucks, a floor storage Rack that acts as my parking lot. I also have network nodes for the drivers to follow as they walk over to their Kiosk. For simplicity, I assumed it would be OK to have a kiosk assigned to each parking spot, so if they parked in the first spot, they use the first Kiosk etc. There is also an object I've marked as an Exit so the trucks can drive away when their driver gets back.

In the Process Flow, I'm using a token Source to create Truck objects in the Queue, which then sends the trucks to the Rack, using the "Task Executor as Flowitem" option found under Use Transport. Next I have a Wait for Event activity that holds the truck token until it arrives tot he parking lot. There's a few different ways to do the truck creation and the initial travel to the Parking Lot but, I chose this way because I thought it looked good.

Once the truck is parked, I figure out which spot the truck is in by using rackgetlevelofitem() and save it to a label. I create a Driver object 'in' the Network Node closest to his parking spot.

I then used a Split activity so I have one token that represents the truck, and another that represents the driver. While the truck does it's delay for check-in, the driver walks to his Kiosk, delays and then walks back to his truck. I use a Synchronize activity so that the truck and the driver have to wait for each other before releasing the truck to the exit.

Have a look at the model, and hopefully this gives you an idea of what is possible

truck-and-driver.fsm

[dustin_s]

I am using a push/pull list in my model to mimic the parking lot. Does this same concept still apply for finding which spot the truck is parked in? I attached my model of my parking spot so you can see my process flow.

[regan_blackett]

So your Pushed token to the list would represent the available parking spot, and you are pulling one of those tokens off the list to represent a truck "getting" a spot? That would work fine too, you would just want to have some kind of value on the Pushed token that tells you what parking spot you grabbed so you can know roughly where to create your person object.

PS. your randomnum label on the queues isn't actually getting set to a random number, it will always be zero. The empirical distribution is expecting to see a table of values with percentage/value pairs in columns 1 and 2 as its first parameter, you have a zero in that first parameter.

[dustin_s]

I see what you are saying here. I am a little confused, would I still need the step of the get truck parking spot in the sample you made?

[regan_blackett]

Not with your List approach, you would just look at something on your pulled token and figure it out that way. I would probably put a reference to a Queue or something that represents the parking spot (maybe that's what you were going for with your queue label?) and do a token.pulled.queue and that tells you were your truck is. So on the create object activity that would create your driver you you could either create them at a network node that is associated with the parking spot like I did, or say that the create destination is 'At' (instead of the default 'In') the token.pulled.queue and have them travel from there.