Hi all ! I only consider myself a happy amateur in this subject, but as a small part of my master thesis in logistics, I simulated the car body and paint factories and a paint factory that the Volvo Car Corporation was planning with an APL simulation model. I had one line for each car body in a production week in a matrix. The line also contained time data. >From the matrix describing production start, I calculated new matrixes for each part of the factory that the cars passed. From this information I calculated interesting statistics, mainly the distribution of the time needed for each car to pass different parts of the factory. I had a lot of fun doing this, and, happily, the result passed the scrutiny of my supervisors.
APL and J seems like nice tools for things like this. If I had used only standard distributions to modify the production plan, I could have used simple standard tools, but with APL you didn't have so many limitations. You could easily make your own distributions. This was long ago, and maybe today there are some standard tools everybody uses. Cheers, Erling Hellenäs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
