Is it possible to use an assembly consisting of a pallet and 100 stacked products as an intermediate buffer between 2 processes?
My downstream process has a higher cycle time and therefore the parts accumulate. When my process node that was implemented as a buffer is full, my handling robot does not know which destination to go to and I get an error. The Buffer in combination with my handling robot works perfektly fineuntil it is full.
1.) One solution would be to delete the parts in the buffer after it is full, unfortunately I do not know how this can be achieved. I do not know how to restart or exit the buffer process.
2.)Another solution would be to implement the buffer as a pallet assembly with transport in and transport out statements. I only have the problem that first all 100 parts are transported in, and none are transported out and not in or out as needed. Also here the functionality to remove a full pallet would be useful.
Could someone give me some helpful tips on one of these solutions?
1: The buffer statement is somewhat limited, without customization options how to handle full buffer etc. It can only stop accepting products and start emptying based on a condition expression. It also only supports a simple XYZ pattern definition for the buffer slots.
2: With this approach I think the issue is that StartTransportOut only checks for products to transport out when the statement starts executing, so in your example it does nothing. You could try to transport in one assembly step (with a suitable batch of products in each step) at a time and then start transporting those out again etc.
Some of the warehousing eCat components have custom Python scripted buffer implementation which you could customize.
However, I think it is not realistic to have constantly growing buffer as you can’t have infinite buffer space in real life. You could try to stop the inflow of products to the buffer on the sending end once the buffer becomes full. I think this could be done with help of GetProperty statement to check the current component count in the buffer’s component container (from connected statistics behaviour) before transporting a product out.
