Grasshopper Process Flow Tools

Dear All

Are general purpose flow charting tools available for Grasshopper please?

Our productivity increase has been so dramatic since using GH, our MD has formed a team to apply similar principles to the rest of the company.

I had considered GH could be used to simulate factory optimization in a factory, using timers to pass numbers from one module to another. Each number could have production rate, down time, block time, etc.

In a service company, however, it isn't quite that easy. I tried the flow charting tools in Excel but by comparison with GH they're painful. Ditto everything else I've tried.

At the moment I'm simply 'panel beating' the labels of VB components. Any help appreciated.

Ian

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on March 13, 2015 at 4:07am

Hmm ... Although maybe there's some plug-in that does "similar" things (I have no idea if it exists, mind) If I had such a task I would follow the code only approach.

So, if no plug-in is available > find a C# man and describe in depth your needs/visions/goals (present and future).

best, Peter

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on March 13, 2015 at 4:24am

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do you want to draw flow charts using the Grasshopper canvas? Do they need to be functional? Do they need to behave differently from Grasshopper components? Do they need to look differently from Grasshopper components?

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on March 13, 2015 at 4:34am

The way that I've understood the issue is that this type of "graphical control" (or some "similar") is desired :

In any case: Google "process flow diagrams", "plant flow charts" ...

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on March 13, 2015 at 6:11am

I did google them and there's a whole bunch of flow chart editors out there already. Trying to shoehorn this into the GH interface is going to be quite a challenge, not to mention well beyond the scope of GH. Because I was confused I decided to ask some follow up questions.

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on March 13, 2015 at 6:24am

You are obviously right (many editors available) but if Ian wants this in GH ...

Permalink Reply by Ian Boyd on March 13, 2015 at 6:37am

Hi David

I realize I need to put a LOT more thought to this. And answering Peter below, classic flowcharting would be very useful too. I've just come out of a meeting and one of the account managers remarked out neat the flowchart looks. Excel and everything else I've tried was a nightmare by comparison. GH's canvas is clean and modern, not a throwback to 1995 :-|

Essentially, I'm including humans in a GH type data workflow. In doing so it becomes clear that not only data is being exchanged, but also information, knowledge and wisdom. So the ability to change the wire display to reflect that would be useful.

Even an innate component with a few different shapes/colours would be useful for now. More or less akin to using a point object when drawing/modeling.

As you can see from the example, humans are represented as a panel with core skill sets in brackets. In the meantime let me work this a bit to see what behaviours would be useful. Sorry for being vague right now.

Attachments:

GH_FlowChart1.png, 369 KB

Permalink Reply by Gregory Epps on March 13, 2015 at 6:33am

The best example of GH style flow charts for projects management I have seen are in Dreamler, developed by Thomas Wingate (who started Shape To Fabrication). Check out what his company is doing, best to look at the blog: http://blog.dreamler.com/ - clearly this is not designed to won't work in GH, but for managing the rest of the company it could be suitable.

Dreamler

Permalink Reply by Ian Boyd on March 13, 2015 at 7:23am

Hi Greg

Will look up Dreamler, thanks! Would still like to test GH with factory optimization though. There are tangible data elements there to work with.

Loving GH. It has just taken me 10 minutes to alter, PDF and email a drawing that would have otherwise taken a couple of hours. Bringing Excel data directly into GH in a meeting just blew their minds.

Thanks everyone!

Ian

Permalink Reply by martyn hogg on March 13, 2015 at 7:33am

Also try Simul8 software. You are talking about discreet event simulation and there are tools out there already that do this. Simul8 is a good alrounder but there are more complex solutions such as Delmia's Quest (If it still exists) that give you a CAD environment to simulate precise representations of your factory or process.

Simul8 has a nice scripting environment like VB so you can customise your own logic but it also has powerful standard components so you can simulate most processes just using the GUI.

I'm sure GH could be sued for discreet event simulation but it would be reinventing the wheel... a bit like using GH to create a spreadsheet.

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