On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 08:58 PM, David Cochrun wrote:
Instead of going back to the top of the car list and continuing the search for car type HopWC-35, the program stops after one pass through the list with only 14 cars found. There are actually 39 cars of type HopWC-35 in the car list. 37 of these cars are available in the Drawer Yard, Drawer #35. The problem is that they only have move counts ranging from 0 to 7 and therefore they are nearer to the top of the sorted car list and already bypassed in the first reading. So cars of type HopWC-35 that were available and requested in a sequence schedule were left behind in the yard and not added to the train.
Not sure why you would think that the program would keep cycling through the car list in order to complete a sequential list of cars needed for a spur. The program was designed to build trains, not service a spur.? Also,?if the spur in sequential mode demanded car type "A special car" , but that car type wasn't available for some reason, the program would cycle forever looking for that car.??
Note that you could use 4 passes to improvement the odds of the program getting all 15 cars for the spur.? But I think by playing with car move counts, that you or I could cause the program to only deliver a limited number of cars to the spur for each train build.? For example, give the cars that are demanded at the start of the schedule the highest move counts, that would make the program only deliver one car on the first pass. Than for the second pass, give the next car type the 2nd highest move count. I think we could force the program to only deliver 4 cars to the spur, not 15, even with 4 passes in aggressive mode.
One possible workaround would be to have multiple spurs running the schedule "
SB 15 groups" and pool them together. Now the odds of getting 15 cars would be much greater. You could also reverse the sequential list of cars for "
SB 15 groups" so that one spur would be looking for the cars at the end of the list while the other spur was looking for cars at the start of the list.Dan
