Slot Weighting Feature

[maryamh11]

I'd like to suggest the addition of an automated slot weighting feature within the rack object slot assignment strategy.

This feature would automatically calculate and assign specific weights to slots based on various factors. These factors might be factors such as proximity to input/output points, the likelihood of product entry/exit, ease of navigation within the storage, slot height for handling efficiency, temperature considerations, and order picking sequence. I think we could then efficiently categorize slots as "hot," "warm," or "cold," which facilitates improved slot assignments that are based on considerations of accessibility and efficiency.

[joerg_vogel_HsH]

I understand what you want to achieve. I think it has been already available by slot labels. Each time you undertake a query to find one slot or you query for a subset of all slots in a warehouse you can calculate a value which distinguish a level of slot quality.

[jason_lightfoot_adsk]

The prebuilt slot assignment strategies logic loops through all the slots and exits when it finds one that matches the strategy - it does not consider all the slots in the way an ORDER BY clause in a findSlot query would.

[jason_lightfoot_adsk]

For this you can use findSlot query/activity so that you can ORDER BY one or more columns that are your described factor - no new development is required.

[joerg_vogel_HsH]

Thank you, @Jason Lightfoot, this makes sense and accelerates findSlot method a lot. Still there are slot labels which can be evaluated finding a slot.

[maryamh11]

@Joerg Vogel@Jason Lightfoot

well, I was thinking about a feature (or key performance metric?) that software calculates and assign weights/scores to slots based on the defined factors (order picking sequence, proximity to enter/exit point, etc.). since the warehouse conditions change over running time (weeks or one month) the software would continually adapt the weights assigned to slots to reflect their utilization. After running the model over replications the software categorizes the slots into hot, warm, and cold based on their assigned weights value to each slot. This is very helpful to optimize slot assignments in real world and to optimize/modify the design of the warehouse. Do we have this feature/KPI already?

I believe Find Slot activity, is more of a search criteria to find available slots based on specific factors. While it's undoubtedly beneficial for organizing slots and assigning items to them, it doesn't inherently generate historical weight data for slots based on the factors I mentioned.

[jason_lightfoot_adsk]

You can write custom user commands to do this for a given slot address that can then be used in PFMs and findslot queries - and any other aspect of the model that might need them.

[maryamh11]

I don't know much about the FlexSim language, so I'm not really good at making user commands. Do you happen to know if someone's already done something like this?

[jason_lightfoot_adsk]

Upon rereading this I wonder if you're asking how to record these statistics by slot. You could try creating a number of tracked variables for each - you may even be able to store them as slot labels - it would need testing/checking.

[maryamh11]

@Jason Lightfoot yes, if this is possible that would be great! Is there any sample model that I can look at for how I can work with tracked variables in this case?

[jason_lightfoot_adsk]

Here's an example of adding a tracked variable to a slot and recording the time to store once an item is loaded on the transporter.

There would be some decision to take in implementing this further:

Should all the tracked variables be initialized at the start or created dynamically as per the example? I think you'd need to identify what you're going to store in the tracked variables and how you're going to use them in order to make any progress with this. All I've done is test that they can be dynamically added and read for each slot, which is the easy part.

StorageSlot_TrackedVariables.fsm

storageslot-trackedvariables.fsm

[maryamh11]

@Jason Lightfoot Thanks for the answer!

I was considering dynamically tracking the slot status and updating that variable. Let me take a look and get back to you. If I see any issues, I'll submit new questions.