The Renege routing is used to cause entities (usually customers) to be routed to another activity or out of the system if they have not started the activity before a specified amount of time has expired. This phenomenon of dropping out of the waiting queue is referred to as reneging or abandonment. The entity will exit the system if you do not connect the routing to another activity or storage. An activity with a renege routing must have an input queue size of one or more.
Usage
• Customers tire of waiting in line or on hold and leave.
• If a customer problem is not handled in the required time, the problem is escalated (renege route) to another process.
• Material waiting processing has an expiration time (such as glue strips or oxygen absorption pads). If the expiration time has lapsed, then the expired material must be removed.
Move time Time to move to the next activity or storage. Any expression is valid.
Renege after The maximum time that an entity will wait for available capacity at the activity before reneging. If capacity becomes available in the activity before the renege time has expired, the entity will not renege, so any additional time spent waiting to capture a resource before beginning the activity is not considered. Any expression is valid.
New Name Optionally assign a new name to the entity. This also assigns a new graphic to the entity if that graphic is defined as an entity on the layout. Assigning a new name is a way to cause separate statistics to be gathered for the entities that actually renege.
An entity can be renamed using either the New Name drop down list in a routing Properties Dialog Box, or the NEWNAME statement in action logic. When renaming, all attributes from the original entity are inherited except the system created attributes ID and Name. The system created attributes which are inherited are Cost, CycleStart, and VATime.
If the renege time is based on entity type, you can make a prior assignment of the renege time to an attribute and reference it in the Renege after field.
If a resource is connected to the activity from which reneging takes place, be sure that the resource is always available to avoid waiting additional time to get the resource. You can do this by making the resource dedicated to the activity or by selecting Respond immediately in the resource assignment connection’s properties dialog. In other words, if there is room to move out of the input queue, but a resource is required but not available, the entity will not be able to renege (it is already committed to move forward).
Remember that a renege only happens from the input queue. If the entity has already moved to the capacity area of the activity, then it can’t renege.
Once an entity has either entered an activity’s capacity or determined that it -will- enter the capacity, the renege will no longer have any effect on that entity. For example, if you get and free your resources in action logic (rather than with a connector line), the entity must enter the activity before it knows whether a resource is available or not. Therefore, if the resource is not available and the entity must wait “in” the activity for the resource longer than the specified renege time, the renege will have no affect on that waiting entity since it has already entered the activity.
Routing Types
The following routing types are available: