Pick multiple products from From Conveyor with human resource

Process Modeling
1

Question: how to transport with the human resource multiple products from a conveyor into an assembly?

Following situation:

  • Conveyor outputs products that are added to a pallet assembly using a human resource.
  • FromCrateAssembly outputs crates to be added to the assembly.
  • ‘PalletAssembly’ creates a pallet and then constructs and assembly (pallet + a pattern of crates), human fills the assembly after which the assembly is destroyed and a new pallet is created.

Challenge: in real life, the human worker would take 3-4 crates from the output conveyor, make a small stack and then transport them onto the pallet. Is there a way to achieve this?

Added 3 transport locations to the human, which should be enough to carry 3 products - it should also be acceptable for the PalletAssembly TransportIn statement for filling the assembly (I hope).

Tried StartTransportIn, but it seems it does not have a source ‘from component container’, so it’s not able to grab it from the conveyor and the product gets lost.

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Thanks!

2

I did something similar using Missions. Add several “Collect” steps so that your resource waits to collect them all, then one “Deliver” step with “DeliverAll” activated.

If you don’t want to use Missions, it could work by having another process at the end of the conveyor with a Buffer or TransportPatternIn. Load the products from “FromCrateAssembly” to this new process with an InterpolatingTransport and then the resource can go and pick all the available products. If you want the resource to be in front of the conveyor while the crates are being stacked, add a Reserve Resource and a 1s Work statement before the TransportPatternIn

3

This approach makes sense. I just tried it, but am running into a few strange things:

So there is an additional process after the From Conveyor process, which has a TransportPatternIn with 3 products and resource is reserved at the conveyor (this is good).

However - when picking the products, the human 1) Flips each products upside down, 2) picks up 2 products instead of 3 and 3) fills both output pallets equally instead of prioritising 1 pallet.

(products do end up the right side up on the pallet, so this is something with the transport)

Increasing the transport capacity to something like 6 has no effect, also KeepOrientation doesn’t affect anything.

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The products / assemblies and also human transport positions all have the z-axis pointing upward - any ideas?

4

…for testing I added another pallet assembly and this time the human picked up all 3 products. Seems that the amount of products that is picked up at a time is related to how many available destinations there are.

I was assuming that if one assembly had many empty slots, then it would consider them “available destinations” and insert the 3 picked products into one assembly. Seems like this is not how it works.

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I guess that leaves the Missions option.

5

try setting the OrderIndex of the Assembly slots on the same number so that it can transport several products at once

6

Thanks, setting an equal OrderIndex fixed it. I didn’t think about this before, but just checked the manual as well and:

Assembly steps are filled consecutively, in a breadth-first manner. Within a step, the OrderIndex property of assembly slots determines the order they are filled in. Slots with the same OrderIndex value will be filled concurrently.

So in case of increasing order indices, if the flow had 2 assemblies to be filled, it would fill pallet 1 - slot 1, pallet 2 - slot 1, pallet 2 - 2, pallet 2 - 2 and so forth.

As for the product flip, I wasn’t able to figure out where it comes from, but was able to resolve it by changing the transport position orientations.