The shift
A day on the floor compressed to a minute. What the animation draws, what it deliberately does not, and how to use the what-if panel.
The Simulation page is a workbench: a panel of readouts and assumptions on the left, the floor filling the rest of the screen, and a drawer along the bottom for the fleet detail and the what-if controls. Press play in the toolbar — or the space bar — and the study's day runs in about a minute: each unit in the fleet moves between the dock and the racking, pauses to handle its load, and a counter climbs as cycles complete. The clock shows which shift you are in and how far through it you are.
- The panel folds away with the button at the left of the toolbar, or the [ key. The drawer opens with the button at the right, or ]. Drag the drawer's top edge to resize it; double-click the edge to reset. Auddomate remembers how you left them.
- The caption in the top corner of the floor says whether the picture is drawn from your site layout or as a straight run from dock to racking. A scale bar sits in the bottom corner when a layout is used.
#What is drawn
- The plan, if the study has one, fitted to the marked-up area. Racking, aisles, docks and blocks are the shapes you drew. An aisle narrower than the study's machine needs is filled red, exactly as in the clearance check.
- One dashed path from the dock centroid to the racking centroid, labelled with the one-way travel distance the model uses.
- One chip per unit, coloured by machine class. A chip moves along the path at the machine's rated speed, pauses for half the handling time at each end, and repeats. Units whose shifts have finished park at the dock and dim.
- A progress bar with a solid marker at the required figure and, when telemetry exists, a dashed marker at the average actually delivered.
#What is not drawn
No chip ever waits for another. No aisle is ever blocked. Nothing charges, breaks down or takes a longer route. That is not an omission; it is the model. The throughput figure is an upper bound that assumes steady flow and no congestion, and the animation is that bound made visible. If you watch it and think "they would never move that cleanly", you have understood the number correctly.
Every position on screen depends only on the clock and the model's inputs. Scrub the slider backwards and forwards and the picture is identical each time. There is no randomness, and nothing is simulated that the report does not state.
#The what-if panel
Open the drawer and choose What if. Drag the one-way travel, handling time or hours per shift, or change the units and shifts on any fleet line. The model re-runs on every change: the readouts in the panel, the verdict pill in the toolbar and the point in the day at which the requirement is met all update as you drag. While anything differs from the saved study, a What-if in play marker appears in the toolbar with a Reset.
Nothing in the what-if tab is saved. To keep a travel distance, handling time or shift length, enter it in the assumptions form in the panel and save. To keep a fleet change, make it on the Fleet page. This is deliberate: the tab is for asking questions, and the study should only change when you have decided on the answer.
#Reduced motion
If your system asks for reduced motion, the shift never starts on its own and never loops. Press play and it will run once, because you asked it to.