Modeling Operator movement between the stations

[svitchintan]

Hi,

I am modeling a manufacturing system in Arena 10.0 where operator is required to do various tasks like process a job, refill a machine and transport a job to new station. After transporting a job to new station, operator repositions himself to his assigned machine.

I am modeling operator as resource (not as transporter) to include features like scheduled capacity and failure schedule ( to include break time). I am not able to move operator from one station to another and moving him back to original location and account for delay because of his inter station movement.

How can I model operator movement between the stations and also include his capacity and failure schedule?

ASAP response will be appreciated.

[Hirotaro]

This problem is indeed a very interesting issue in Arena.

Basically, if one decides to use transporters to model such a system, he can use ‘Halt’ and ‘Activate’ modules to model transporter schedules or breakdowns. Nevertheless it can be quite cumbersome to do it effectively in polymorphic way, when one is dealing with multiple transporters (as resources) with different schedules.

Alternatively, when resources are used, it might be an option to combine ‘Delay’ module with assignment of different resource states. When many different locations and resources are present in the system, this option does not seem to be straight forward either.

Perfect option would be if Positional resources could account for movement time as transporters do.


Hopefully there is someone professional on this forum who can address these questions and put some light on it.