Question About Way of Obtaining Time

[jeromejin]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Arena. Now I'm trying to model a Call Center Problem.

A type of entity enters a branch. First a resource is seized for it. Then it enters a process. If there's only one resource for this type of entity, the following entities will form a queue in Seize module. Now I wanna obtain the waittime of each entity in the queue of that seize module. I tried to form a Variable Array, with a variable as the index. The time of the first entity is restored in A(a), when the second one's is restored in A(a+1). But it seems that Arena cannot recognize a variable for index, it only accepts an integer.

After the entity is processed, a Decide module is used to determine if TNOW exceed a certain time(non-office hours, actually the resource is only available in office hours). If so, then I need to obtain the exceeded time and hold the resource until the start of the next day and then occupy the exceeded time. For example, if the process is finished at 5:30, while the office hour is 8:00AM to 5:00PM. I need to hold this resource until 8:30AM on the next day.

Any advice please?

[ewilliams]

To handle this situation, I recommend using a Resource Schedule. The Resource would be scheduled available 8AM - 5PM. In the Schedule data module, there are three schedule rules: Ignore, Wait, and Preempt (page 137 of the 5th edition of Simulation with Arena, if you have access to this book). The rule you need is "Preempt."