2019 People Module Update

Here’s a quick look at some new features found in FlexSim 2019.

We’ve made some significant additions and improvements to the People Module, a set of tools and activities to help you model people-based systems in FlexSim.

Perhaps the most used new feature will be the People Activity Sets. These are groups of activities to quickly model specific events. Simply drag these templates into the model, hook them into your process logic, and edit as needed. For example, this lets you simply drag out the activity set for Transport then Process instead of having to individually drag out and arrange all of the acquire activities, resources, and other elements that are involved. The Activity Sets should speed up your model building significantly.

The new Process activity allows you to represent a delay time for a process, similar to the Delay activity. But unlike the Delay activity, you can also specify which objects or entities are involved in the process, what state they’re in during the process, and what happens when the process is preempted or resumed.

And speaking of preemption, many people-based systems have specific behaviors when services to patients or customers are changed or interrupted. We’ve added a priority value to resource objects; it’s used when acquiring and preempting resources in these cases.

The new Person Process Flow type adds a few extra features from other types of Process Flows. It automatically creates an “Arrivals” flow where you can set the arrivals for people in your model. These arrivals are automatically connected to the “Person Flow,” where people move through the logic and behaviors you’ve specified in the model.

Finally, we’ve also added functionality to better simulate shift schedules, using FlexSim’s Time Table and Down Behavior tools.

Thanks for watching, and we hope you enjoy FlexSim 2019.