Arena Newsletter and Blog

Sometimes, a high speed packaging line must handle products that need to be stabilized during movement because of their size, shape, or spill potential. When this situation occurs, a common solution is to place the product into a puck, or carrier, during conveyance through the line operations. However, this can present a challenge to the modeler in exactly how to represent the introduction of empty pucks to the line, marrying the product with the puck, and de-pucking the product when complete. The following example discusses how to use pucks in a 1:1 relationship to product on a line.

Arena allows you to define conveyor operation as a fixed path for material movement with pre-defined entry and exit points using the modules on the Advanced Transfer panel. Each entity to be conveyed must wait for sufficient space on the conveyor in order to gain entry and start transferring. When the entity reaches the end of the conveyor, the conveyor is disengaged until the entity is removed from the conveyor or conveyed to another station.

When developing a model of a large system, you may have multiple large two-dimensional variable arrays that describe equipment parameters, facility characteristics, or other aspects of your system. Many times you can streamline your modeling effort by collecting these two-dimensional arrays under one “umbrella” and then pointing to the specific piece of information where needed in your logic. For instance, let’s say your supply chain model needs to define specific information for several different sites. Each site has up to 1000 SKUs and each SKU has a unique activity time for up to 20 activities. For clarity, you want to have each site’s information stored in its own uniquely-named, two-dimensional variable array. Furthermore, you anticipate the logic for the activities at each site will be similar, regardless of the site. Only the actual data values are expected to be different.

How can you determine if your system can deliver what has been promised? There may be contractual obligations you must meet relating to cost, throughput, or staffing requirements. How can you be confident that you can meet cost expectations as proposed? Can your system meet throughput requirements with the proposed changes to product flow? Do resources supplied by vendors perform as expected? If you increase customer demand, how does this impact your staffing requirements?