Problem with Hourly Arrivals and stoparrivals()

I have a PatientArrivals object set with hourly arrivals for a week, but on one scenario i had to use a schedule for the first day and then continue using the hourly arrivals.

Ok, so i use a user event to execute stoparrivals(object) in time 0 and then one at the end of the day to resumearrivals(object).

The problem is that when i resume the arrivals the patientarrivals object uses the hourly arrivals of the first day(start with the number of arrivals of the 1,1 cell instead of the 1,2 on the table)... same happens if i stoparrivals for any other period of time...

regards

Pablo Concha Erilkin

Pablo,

The stoparrivals() and resumearrivals() commands were intended to be used for patient arrivals defined with Interarrival Times only. We figured that a modeler could "stop" their hourly or scheduled arrivals by simply not defining any arrivals during the period of time they wanted the arrivals to be "stopped".

The stop/resume commands will break the functionality of Hourly Arrivals, Appointments, and Custom Arrivals. If you want to use the commands on a PatientArrivals object that has both Interarrival Times and one or more of the other types of arrivals defined on it, then you must split the arrivals up and define them on two different PatientArrivals objects.

As I'm answering this post, I realize there could be other interpretations and possible applications of the stop/resume arrival commands that we are not fully addressing. For instance, it's not perfectly clear to me how we should be resuming random arrivals. Should we pull another interarrival time sample from the random distribution at the time the resumearrivals() command is called, or should we use the original time sample. If we use the original time sample, should be immediately generate a patient arrival if the time has already passed.

If in your example, you were hoping to be able to stop/resume the Hourly Arrivals table arrivals, then I'm curious what situation in real life you were trying to model, and why it wasn't good enough to simply put 0's in the Hourly Arrivals table for the times you didn't want arrivals. Maybe we need to add functionality to the stop/resume arrival commands to handle more situations. There also might be other ideas I could give you for how to model the situation. Since it took me so long to respond to your post, maybe you've come up with an alternate solution on your own. If so, I'd like to hear about it.

Hi CLiff,

the problem was of a colleague of mine, but i think he didn't want to put 0's because the lenght of time he wanted to stop the arrivals was variable, also while the hourly arrivals was stoped he used a schedule to replace the hourly arrivals.

not sure, but i think to make it work he used a global table with the hourly arrivals and created a schedule based on each cell each hour , then he just used the cells he needed and skipped the ones when the arrival should stop..

regards

Pablo

Sounds like a clever approach!