ARENA: Scheduling Arrivals without Uncertainty

[Paul]

Hi everybody,

I'd like to model dynamic deterministic demand in terms of entity arrivals based on a predetermined schedule. Hence, interarrival times should not be random numbers, i.e., no probability distribution should be used to create the entities. ARENA, however, generates exponentially distributed interarrival times in its SCHEDULE module. Is there any possibility to change this default into constant times between arrivals time-dependend on a schedule.

Many thanks in advance.

Paul

[ewilliams]

Perhaps surprisingly, I suggest not using the Schedule module at all. Instead, I suggest: In your Create module, select Constant for Time Between Arrivals. Put a variable name in Value. Change that variable whenever you need to via another Create block which gives birth to an entity every hour (or however often the arrival rate and hence time between arrivals might change). That entity can read the updated time-between-arrivals from an Excel worksheet or an internal variable array (by incrementing the subscript appropriately).

[Paul]

Thanks a lot. That is a pretty good idea. I haven't tried to model it yet but it sounds very promising.