.BusinessSimulation.Stocks.Conveyor

Information

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The Conveyor (aka pipeline delay) bevhaves as one would expect a conveyor belt to work: What flows into the Conveyor will flow out after a period given by delayTime or the variable input u has passed. The order of outflow will preserve the order of inflow, i.e., when the delay time increases or decreases during the simulation, then it will affect everything that is currently "loaded" on the conveyor in the same way. Therefore, material might come out at the same time as material that had entered before, but it can never overtake older entries (this would be possible in a PureDelay).

Implementation

The Conveyor  will work at discrete time intervals:

when sample(modelSettings.modelStartTime + samplingPeriod, samplingPeriod) then
  // load new material onto conveyor, move loaded material, unload material
end when;

The values for the in- and outflows and the load will be kept constant between events.

Notes

• All inflows have to go to the inflow port of the Conveyor.


• Since the outflow will be controlled by the Conveyor, →OutflowDynamicStock or →SplitOutflowDynamicStock have to be connected to the outflow port.


• Using more than one outflow (e.g., →SplitOutflowDynamicStock) can be used to model leaking.


• The parameter init in the Advanced tab allows to select →InitializationOptions:
  • FixedValue (default) will initialize the stock according to value given by the parameter initialValue.
  
  
  • SteadyState will use Little's Law to determine the equilibrium start value as inflow.rate * delayTime
  
  
  • Free tells the solver that it is free in solving the initial value problem using initialValue as startValue.
• The Conveyor behaves exactly like the PureDelay or the SimpleConveyor when there is a constant delay time; the Conveyor stock can deal with variable delay times and will preserve order of entry.

See also

SimpleConveyor, PureDelay, DelayFixed, DelayInformation