How to create operators and time tables at reset from data in file

Hi,

In case someone is wondering how to use input data in a file to create operators, time tables and then assign the time tables to the operators there are a few things to do. There could be different ways to do this, but this option worked fine for me.

1. Do all the creating of operators, time tables and assigning operators to time tables in the onModelReset trigger (Can be created in the Tools window, add 'Modeling Logic > Model
Triggers > On Reset'). You have to do these things in the model reset trigger and not in the onReset trigger of an object as the time tables and their connections to operators need to exist before the other objects are reset. This was a tip from Phil BoBo at Flexsim support.

2. Delete all time tables except for one so that you can copy it if you need more of them

3. Read the file containing the operator schedules and create the operators and the table data nodes in the time table according to the schedule. If you need different time tables for the different operators then create a copy of the original time table and insert the values into the new time table.

4. Assign the operators to their corresponding time tables

Hope this helps!

Axel

Hi,

An additional note.

When you create the time tables using code be sure to check that you do not create any zero second long down times in the time table unless necessary. This could easily happen when you have a weekly schedule in your initial data where you set how long the operator works each day. This would mean that a shift from Monday 8pm to Tuesday 6am could be marked as Monday 8pm-12midnight and Tuesday 12midnight-6am. This could easily lead to a zero second length downtime at midnight if you handle the days separately when you create the time table.

Zero second long down times in the middle of the time table seem to work ok, but for example for a weekly repeating schedule a zero delay down period at the midnight that ends the week this skips the whole next week, but the following week is normal again.

I asked Flexsim why zero delays can cause problems so find the answer from Ryan below.

The reason why a zero delay is not working is not because it fundamentally doesn't work, it is behaving as expected it's occurring and the delay is zero so this means the operator goes down and before any time has passed the operator is resumed this is how it's supposed to behave. The problem is in the code we're preempting and aborting the active task sequence so if the active one is to retrieve an item from the source at the time then we're aborting that task sequence and now the item is stuck in the source and it will never be retrieved and then the down task sequence is executed because it was not aborted so using a 0 duration causes problems because of how our code works.

For example, in the model the operator is carrying an item to the queue at midnight of day 7 so the downfunction fires and now after that task sequence is finished it will go to the down location but instantly after the downfunction fires the upfunction fires which aborts the task sequence involving the item and now it still has the downfunction task sequence in it's task sequence queue so it now performs that task sequence and waits there until it receives more tasksequences.

The way to get around this is to either make it a small duration for the shift change maybe about 5 mins (just enough to finish any tasks that were already happening before the downfunction) or you could add some checking in the code to make sure you're only aborting the right task sequence, but this seems unnecessary if all you are doing is having the operator stop operating/processing for down time because 0 down time means no down time so why even have a down time there at all? Now if you plan on assigning labels or other logic at each downfunction call then it would be necessary. Either way you can do that if you want to.

Axel