Bucket Definition

Allocation and backflushing are done per line station per bucket when you use Line Station Based Transaction Processing, which means that all the line station orders in one bucket are combined. This reduces the number of transaction, compared with Order Based transaction processing. The performance is further enhanced if you use larger buckets, because this reduces the number of transactions.

After you define the buckets, you must run Generate Buckets, which is available from the appropriate menu, to generate the buckets for the full allocation time fence in Assembly Control. The buckets for the period length must be the same as for the Allocation Horizon, which is defined in the Assembly Control Parameters (tiasc0100m000) session, because allocation is done within the allocation time fence.

It is best to define a whole number of buckets per day. If not, your buckets will be of different lengths. For example, if you enter 10 hours into this field, LN will generate two buckets each of ten hours and one bucket of four hours (for one day of 24 hours). If you make many changes to assembly orders you should make your buckets smaller than if you make few changes.

Example

In the current session you enter the following:

Period No. days Bucket length Unit
1 1 4 hour
2 1 8 hour
3 1 12 hour

In the Allocation Horizon field of the Assembly Control Parameters (tiasc0100m000) session you can enter, for example, 5 days.

When you select the Generate Buckets option, the following buckets are generated:

Bucket Day number Start End
1 1 00:00 04:00
2 1 04:00 08:00
3 1 08:00 12:00
4 1 12:00 16:00
5 1 16:00 20:00
6 1 20:00 24:00
7 2 00:00 08:00
8 2 08:00 16:00
9 2 16:00 24:00
10 3 00:00 12:00
11 3 12:00 24:00
12 4 00:00 12:00
13 4 12:00 24:00
14 5 00:00 12:00
15 5 12:00 24:00

The final two lines were created because the allocation time fence was filled.

Note: You can view the buckets you have defined with the Buckets (tiasl1501m000) session. You can print out the data you have entered in this session, by selecting Print Bucket Definition from the File menu.