Advanced Transporter

[Niklas]

Hi,

I am currently building a model in which products in boxes are stored in queues. An Advanced Transporter carries the boxes from the queue to an unpack atom where one product is unpacked. Afterwards the boxes are carried back to the queue. The boxes get a label with the priority for transportation when entering the atom. There are several queues with boxes and only two unpack atoms.

If both unpack atoms are busy at the same time and the transporter picks up a box at a queue, it generates a deadlock because at every unpack station is only capacity for one box. How is it possible to make the Advanced Transporter wait at the unpack atom if both unpack atoms are busy until one of them has finished without picking up a new box before?

Many thanks in advance!

Kind regards,
Niklas

[Markus Holzner]

Hi Niklas,

the Adv. Transporter always tries to transport products (box, pallet, etc.) if those are available. Therefore, an option to prevent that is to control the material flow by using CloseOutput, CloseInput, OpenOutput and OpenInput commands.
I have attched a simple model that should demonstrate how that can be done.
The model contains 2 queues (Queue1 and Queue2) where transport orders are generated and the Adv. Transporter will process. So, I added a CheckQueue each in front of these queues to control the number of transport orders. In that case it is just one at a time as I have only one Unpack.
Please, have a look at entry and exit triggers of those CheckQueues.
Also, check Queue35, that is used to transport the empyt box back to Queue11 or Queue12.
Check the entry trigger here as a function is used called "CheckQueues_CheckOpening" that determines which CheckQueue might be opened again to transport a box to the Unpack.
I hope that helps in first place. If you have questions, please, let me know.

Best regards,
Markus