System slow due to millions of parts creating at the start of simulation

[sujit_patilSGWAM]

[ FlexSim 24.0.0 ]

Hello, At the start of simulation we shown millions of parts should present in warehouse racks, which is resulting in slow running of simulation. We provided delay of 10-20-30 seconds for parts. Now at the start of simulation the model is working fine, but once all parts appear in the racks, it slows down again. Need help on it.

[joerg_vogel_HsH · Accepted solution]

• You can virtualize stored items.
• You can use slot labels to replace items by label value and prevent by this label value to put other items into such a slot or choose it as an available slot.
• You can try to find a computer which is faster.
• You can implement distributed computing on more computers.
• You can store items in your warehouse only needed for actual existing tasks.
• If you have items in your storage system packed on or in container items and you must have a visual content, then you can show those items as drawsurrogate shapes. And you replace items data by labels. This is something I do in an Autostore myself currently.

[jason_lightfoot_adsk]

If you are using tokens for each item at the start you can probably speed up the initialization by doing it all in custom code with just one token to invoking the activity.

[sujit_patilSGWAM]

is there any limitation for parts creation? We need millions of parts so have given delay. I have gone through the minimum specification for computer mentioned on website and my computer is of higher configuration.

[jason_lightfoot_adsk]

The system specifications are probably based on most users requirements and having a 'useful' model - one that runs faster than realtime. If you want 5million flow items for example then it's simple mathematics. Since it looks like a bare flowitem (no labels) uses 4.7KB that would imply 5M items will use 23.5GB of memory (per FlexSim instance/replication)

In theory if you have the memory (6TB in Windows 11 Pro workstation) - FlexSim can fill it with items (1.276billion). The chances are the model will not run faster than realtime with this number, or any queries on the storage system would take too long - so we're not going to recommend the maximum memory that windows can address, even if FlexSim were able to use it.

We have mass flow conveyors for conveying vast numbers of items. Elsewhere you may be able to approximate with fluids or batch into containers

[SCHamoen]

@Sujit You state that you need millions of flowitems, but why do you need that? Basically you only need a flowitem when it has to be picked or placed in a rack. All the other flowitems are just there for visualisation purposes and that can be solved in very many different ways.

[Jeanette_Fullmer]

Hi @Sujit, was Joerg Vogel's answer helpful? If so, please click the "Accept" button at the bottom of their answer. Or if you still have questions, add a comment and we'll continue the conversation.

If we haven't heard back from you within 3 business days we'll auto-accept an answer, but you can always comment back to reopen your question.