Queues
A Queue is a place where work to be done can wait until appropriate Resources or Activities are available.
A Queue is one of the fundamental objects that make up the structure of your simulation.
For purposes of animation, Queues are assumed to be “close to” the Activities they feed. This means the Work Items take no time to travel from a queue to an Activity. However, Work Items may, take time to travel from an Activity to a Queue.
Work Items can be allowed to “expire” while in a Queue. For example if people enter a shop and are willing to queue for up to 5 minutes, set the Shelf Life in the Queue dialog to 5 minutes.
When simulating some processes (e.g. an oven) you might want to use a Queue to act as a simple Activity but one that can contain many Work Items. However you would want to set a minimum time that the Work Items must stay in the Queue. Use the Min Wait Time box to set this minimum.
To look at the performance of a queue over the time of the run click the results button in the Queue dialog.