Creating Delay Profiles

A Delay Profile determines how and when Entities are delayed when they are affected by a Delay Point. They are used to model temporal elements, such as the time taken to be serviced at ticket machines or the length of time passengers spend inside a store.

To complete a Delay Profile, you need to have defined time intervals for your model as described in step one of To define precise Arrival Profile data. You can use existing time intervals if you have them, or enter new ones on a fresh row.

There are three types of delay you can specify:

Fixed delay of – enter a fixed delay period, in seconds.
Wait until – enter the model time up until which you would like Entities to wait, or select a Condition which defines when their wait is over.
Variable delay of – enter values in seconds for a Boltzmann Distribution (this requires you to enter values for min, mean and max values).

You can also define at which time over the course of a simulation these delay periods are effective. For example, you can create a Delay Profile which delays Entities for 12 seconds but is only active for a certain ten minute period of the simulation; you can set a profile which endures throughout the whole length of the simulation, or one that is effective at different periods of the simulation.

To create a Delay Profile:

In the first cell of a new row, select Delay Profile from the drop-down list.
In the next cell along, enter a name in the column labelled ‘Profile name’.
Under each relevant time interval, enter the type of delay you require at that point in the model’s runtime. There are three methods ('Wait until' requires either a model time or a Condition):
- To add a Fixed delay, enter a single value in seconds (this will delay affected Entities by this amount across the time interval).
- To instruct affected Entities to Wait until a specific time, enter the time using the format hh:mm:ss.
- To instruct affected Entities to Wait until a pre-defined Condition is met.
- To specify a Variable delay, enter three values separated by commas for the min, mean and max values.