Warehourse Initial Stock and Arrivals with Process Flow

[Alejandradelat]

[ FlexSim 23.2.0 ]

Hi!
I'm doing a distribution center simulation. The idea is that the simulation starts with an initial inventory, and then there are some arrivals in two docks. Until now, I only have the process flow of the initial inventory and the unloading process of the arrivals. But I'm having some trouble.

1. I tried to do the process flow to create an initial inventory with random slot allocation, and it is working. However, the pallets are created in ANY empty slot (including floor storage) but I only want to have initial inventory on the Racks. I tried to fix it with code, but it didn´t work.

2. On the unloading process, when the forklifts take the pallets into the floor storage, they do not unload it on the designated spaces, they put the pallets outside of the floor storage so it looks weird, is there a way to fix it?

3. On the unloading process the forklifts are taking too much time in loading and unloading the pallets, I don't know why because I put a delay of 10 seconds, however, they are taking minutes.

4. How can I make the boxes the same color as the pallet color? I tried to use the same logic of assigning them Client labels as for the pallet, however I got an error.

5. I only put 3 clients to test the model logic, however, I need to have 70 different clients, is there a way to create a label Clients that contains the 70 clients but doesn't require entering them manually?

Thank you so much for your help and your response, Im really grateful 😄

I'm attaching my model so you can take a look at it.

SimpleModel.fsm

[moehlmann_fe · Accepted solution]

1. You have to differentiate the slots in racks and floor storages somehow. An easy solution would be to set different zone IDs for both in the address scheme of the objects, then filter for the "Rack-Zone" in the Find Slot activity (slot.zoneID == ...). You could also use slot labels as an alternative method.

2. The pallets do not physically fit into the slots in this orientation, so they are placed beside the slots (the same happens if you move an item into a queue that is larger than the queue itself for example). Either change the slot or item sizes accordingly or rotate the items by 90° before moving them into the storage.

3. The load and unload tasks always include the time set in the properties of the task executers. Set those to 0 so only the delay of the Process Flow matters.

4. It seems like you tried to pass an array of items into the Change Visual activity. It only works on a single object, so you need to create a subflow that colors each item individually. Or you use code (in a Custom Code activity), which can actually be quicker to type out than setting up the needed activities.

Object pallet = token.pallet;
for(int i = 1; i <= pallet.subnodes.length; i++)
{
    pallet.subnodes.as(Object).color = pallet.color;
}

5. If all values are equally likely, you could just use the "duniform()" distribution. If you want to use percentages, like you have with the three current values, I'd suggest to set up an empirical distribution. The table view makes entering a large number of values easier than the activity GUI.

Empirical("EmpiricalDistribution1").get()

[Alejandradelat]

Thanks Felix, do you maybe know how to set different zones IDs? And then how can I tell in the process flow that I just want to use that specific ID zone?

[Alejandradelat]

Does someone know how to set different zones IDs? And then how can I tell in the process flow that I just want to use that specific ID zone? I tried looking where in flexsim do you set the zone IDs but didn't find it. Thank you so much

[moehlmann_fe]

Set the address scheme of the storage object to "DefaultScheme" or create a new scheme that contains the zone ID in the storage system properties (in the toolbox).

https://docs.flexsim.com/en/23.2/Reference/PropertiesPanels/WarehousingPanels/AddressMapping/Address...

Then filter for slots with a specific value with "WHERE slot.zoneID == ..." in the query. Multiple "WHERE"-conditions can be combined with AND or OR keywords between them.