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I am modeling a warehouse yard where trucks arrive, get loaded/offloaded and leave the site. The complexity arises when modeling the drop trailers. Those vehicles consist of two parts: tractor and trailer. Tractor and trailer enter the yard as one entity and move to the parking lot. There, the tractor drops the trailer (turquoise colored rectangles in the picture below) and then then leaves the yard. After some time another tractor (pink colored in the picture below) comes to pick up one of those trailers. When there is no free space in the parking lot, model throws an error, because I use carMoveTo block to send it to the parkingLot. Therefore it requires additional space to move the tractor. How can I avoid this issue? In fact, I do not want that pink tractor to seize a free parking lot, but to pick up one of those trailers. I tried suppressing the error by using "on the way not found" option in the carMoveTo block, but I need to get a close-to-reality animation of the yard.

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Yashar Ahmadov
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I would not advise mixing the road traffic library blocks with the Process Modelling Library (PML) Blocks, unless you really need to.

You can get near-perfect animation by making use of a network-type model and just the PML blocks. You will start by replacing your Car Move To block with just a MoveTo block

You can check the WholeSale Warehouse example in AnyLogic.

There they make use of a network diagram and PML blocks to simulation all the relative parking movements of trucks and trailers.

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You can do something similar by creating the correct network and node points that indicate how a truck must move when it is parking a trailer and when it is picking up a trailer.

If this solution is not scalable and you cant draw lines, you can always simply just specify the X,Y, Z coordinates.

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You might then need multiple MoveTo blocks for the entire movement or you can create some sort of loop where you give a truck a list of locations to move to, the truck will go through the loop and simply execute moving to the next location in the list, until it is done and then continue with the flow chart

Jaco-Ben Vosloo
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  • Thank you for the answer. The problem with this is that it is not scalable. In my case, I have hundreds of parking slips and dock doors. Drawing them one by one is not feasible.. – Yashar Ahmadov Aug 09 '21 at 09:11
  • Thank you for the added detail. Your initial problem will be resolved by simply using a move to block instead of the car move to. See my updated answer for not having to use a network of lines. But in order to get realistic animation, you might need to have multiple movements setup for each agent. Simply make them move a few meters away from the trailer, then reverse to the trailer then pickup etc. – Jaco-Ben Vosloo Aug 09 '21 at 10:15