Discontinuous conveyors

[Lorenzo Ferro]

Dear Harry,

it often need to model conveyors where parts stop in a certain position and then go back.

To do so, I was used to insert in the model two separate conveyors, each with a proper length based on the length of the entity to be processed.

It works until the entities length does not change in the simulation but it can happen that the entity length is a parameter or that it changes during the simulation run. In this case I cannot have the entities stop in the right position because the conveyor is too long.

I saw previous posts on similar subjects but no solution for my case.

I was wandering of it would be possible one of the following options:

1) having the chance to dynamically change the EntityConveyors Points coordinates via an input editor formula (and maybe also changing other graphical features like the entities size, alignment and orientation). Changing the input file for each run would be an option in case the entities dimension would not change during the runtime, that is not my case.

2) having the chance to start an Entity travel from a certain position of an EntityConveyor, for example having a sort of FastForward parameter to be set during the simulation. In this case I could try to stop the  Entity travel on the first conveyor (with an ImmediateReleaseThreshold or changing the conveyor speed to a big value, or something else...) then release the Entity and let it proceed to the next conveyor but starting its travel from the expected ahead position.

Thank you,

Lorenzo