A new advanced buffer component has now been published in 4.10 eCat under category Warehousing.
This component is used for building custom buffer patterns for advanced Process Modelling use cases. This is enabled by using the Assembly Editor for defining a buffer with arbitrary slot positions, sizes and product filters.
By using Assembly Editor to build a custom buffer, this component introduces 3 new features:
Possibility to define a different product filter for each buffer slot
Possibility to place buffer slots in arbitrary positions and sizes
Possibility to define arbitrary priority order for filling the slots (BufferNeedMode = OrderIndex)
The component comes with a default assembly product type that you may modify.
To help you in start, this component features a Guided Workflow. You may open the guided workflow by selecting the component and clicking the icon that appears inside the component in 3D world.
In addition to that, a layout template “PM Warehousing - Buffer with Individually Customizable Slots examples” has been published in eCat category Layout Templates to showcase three varying use cases of this component:
Shelf with different product type filter in each slot
Circular LIFO stack with filling order set by OrderIndex of assembly slots
Filtering random-sized products based on their dimensions (will they fit in a slot)
thank you for the new great component, but there will also be an update in the future to reflect the real case of storage, where the slots are defined by size?
So you can store a maximum of 8x reds or 16x greens or 24x blues, but the number is always different.Either 1x large 2x medium or 3 small parts fit into each compartment. The buffer spaces are then dynamic.
Hello,
Thank you for the interesting idea. This is unfortunately not possible without refactoring the entire Python script behind this component, as this (and all other warehousing components) are implemented with a simplifying assumption: exactly 1 product can fit in 1 buffer slot.
A buffer similar to what you described would be possible to implement, but adding that as a feature in this component would explode the amount of complexity in this component. Therefore, we would rather like to implement a separate component for that purpose (without the assembly product type features as a generic shelf).
I will discuss this idea with my colleagues, but that feature would anyways be in a separate component that is built from scratch.
In the meantime, could you use conveyors as a workaround? If you set the distance between ToConveyor and FromConveyor components very carefully, the conveyor path can handle the management of dynamic buffer space (with some pitfalls).
Yes, that’s right, because theoretically you have to re-evaluate all the time what places are free and where exactly the next part should go.
In reality, the case is somewhat simpler, as the forklift driver can visually see whether there is still enough space for his pallet in the slot or not and could therefore pack something smaller.
We recently had this case in a project, but then agreed with the customer to arrange the respective areas for the respective sizes so that there was no overlap, but in reality this would not be possible.
It would definitely be great if VC developed its own component for this, because I suspect I’m not the only one who has faced this problem, especially in view of the fact that there are more and more digital twins.
