Examples
Each of these models is run end to end to produce the numbers on its page. Copy any of them into a file and it validates and simulates as it stands.
They start with places everybody has stood in and finish with a factory cell. If you are new to this, read them in order — each one introduces one idea and reuses everything before it.
Any unfamiliar word is in the glossary.
| what it shows | the lesson | |
|---|---|---|
| A paint shop | one dispatch rule, changed | 63× the cycle time, and no capacity added |
| A petrol station | pumps, a till, and a tank that needs refilling | the constraint is the cheapest thing on site |
| A grocery checkout | one queue against a queue per till | 2.6× longer for the same three tills |
| A shelf and a storeroom | stock in two places, and two ways to lose a sale | 6,398 sales lost while the storeroom never runs short |
| A job shop | a three-step route | the busy column is not where the problem is |
| A bonding cell | people, material, batching, breakdowns, maintenance | one machine decides everything |
| Inspection desks | a desk called up by the queue, and a price sheet | the plant gets 26% faster and loses money |
Where to start
- Never modelled anything before? Start with the grocery checkout. It has one resource and one step, and it still produces a result worth acting on.
- Want to see why this is worth doing at all? The paint shop is the one from the front page: two models identical but for a single rule, and a factor of sixty-three between them.
- Wondering what a real model looks like? The bonding cell switches on every optional mechanism at once.
- Need to know whether a change pays for itself? Inspection desks is the one where every operational measure improves and the money still says no.
scripts/check-doc-models.py verifies every documented key on these pages against
schema.rs, and
every field of every results document against what the CLI actually emits. The first draft of
this documentation invented five keywords that read perfectly and would have been rejected by
the parser.
How to read an example
Each page has the same parts, in the same order:
- The plant — what it is, in plain words.
- A picture — the layout at a glance.
- How it maps — which real thing became which keyword.
- What one job does — the path through the model.
- The model — the complete document, nothing elided.
- What comes out — the actual results document, unedited.
- What it says — what the numbers mean, and what you would do about them.
Step 6 is the one worth lingering on. Every number quoted in step 7 comes from the document above it, so you can check the reading rather than take it on trust. The fields themselves are explained in Reading the results.