Written by on Friday July 19th 2013 in Simul8 Tips, Technical Corner

SIMUL8 Tip – Replicate and Resources

If you have a system where:

  • an activity can be processing more than one job at a time

or

  • where the same task is worked on by multiple activities in parallel.

Then you may want to consider using SIMUL8’s ‘Replicate’ feature.

 How Replicate works:

In this example we are looking at how customers at a Grocery Store progress through 7 checkouts. On the left we have modeled this the traditional way, on the right we have used the replicate feature. In both cases the process behavior and output will be the same.

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The replicate feature makes one activity act as though it is several activates; it will behave as though it is the number of activities that we state as the Replicate Value.

Setting the Replicate Value:

The Replicate value will set the maximum number of simultaneous jobs that can be processed at once. To set this value:

  1. Left-click on the activity to select it.
  2. Choose the ‘Additional’ tab.
  3. Set the Replicate number in this box.

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Adding Resources:

At the Grocery Store we could find that we have 7 checkouts but actually only have 4 staff members. In this case we would only be able to have 4 checkouts active and we would only be able to process a maximum of 4 jobs at any time. This is the same way that adding a resource requirement will influence a replicated activity. So if we add a resource to the simulation and assign it to the activity, the maximum number of jobs that can process at the same time will now be  limited by either; the number of available resources or by the replication value (whichever is lowest).

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