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Hysteresis for logistic system

Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2014 2:01 pm
by Brathahn
hi,
i want to suggest a hysteresis setting for the logistic system.
example: a requester chest is set to maintain 500 items with a hysteresis of +200. so the logistic bots will fill that chest with 700 items and then only start filling again when the value drops below 500 items.
another possibility would be a +- setting. so 500 items with hysteresis of +-100 would be fill at 400 and stop at 600 items. same goes with negative numbers.
i think this will be a huge energy (and cpu-load) saving mechanism for the game. maybe only available with a specific research.

thank you for reading

Re: Hysteresis for logistic system

Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2014 9:23 pm
by MF-
Isn't a large hysteresis going to overload the roboport / production lines when it triggers?
For a small hysteresis + loginetwork it kinda works right now, doens't it?

also
possibility of an avalanche effect when systems with hysteresis are chained,
causing massive energy consumption peaks that some might not prepare for and expect.

Re: Hysteresis for logistic system

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 8:45 pm
by ssilk
I'm nearly sure, that we already had suggestions, which are about requesting a "range" or so. But I didn't find them.

The current behavior is also a bit like so: If a chest if full, then nothing will be requested, until one stack is empty.
CPU-wise I think there is no big difference, until you don't check for number of items but number of full stacks.

Re: Hysteresis for logistic system

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:41 pm
by Brathahn
ssilk wrote:The current behavior is also a bit like so: If a chest if full, then nothing will be requested, until one stack is empty.
well that is only halfway correct
this chest here is satisfied
Image

while this one is requesting
Image

now imagine the chest is standing on a far edge of your factory with some assembling machines hooked to it. the chest will never be filled. the consequence is a logistic robot polonaise wich is blocking other requesting chests.
with a hysteresis the chest would be filled up to lets say 500 items in one big request and then the robots can handle other requests.

Re: Hysteresis for logistic system

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 10:15 pm
by ssilk
This is much more complicated, as you describe it. Factorio counts also the number of items currently on the way. As said, this is working like so with full chests. Full chests! :) For just this few items the difference in delivery (= number of needed bots to keep it delivered) is not very remarkable.

And what you don't think about: When the bots already handle requests for other chests?

Re: Hysteresis for logistic system

Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2014 1:00 pm
by SHiRKiT
The general concept is nice, but it doesn't work quite well since it will start delivering things in Batches of a lot of stuff, which can cause issues, but if you use it everywhere, the exact same result would show off.

Maybe, which makes more sense to me is to implement this with an auto priority system.

X = Requester chest with filter to 100 coal, and +50 range.
Y = Requester chest with filter to 300 coal, and +10 range.

When we first build Y, we fill up it to 400 coal, and it will start to get consumed.
When the coal supply on it goes to 400, it gets low priority, but it will be filled up by the bots even when 1 piece gets used.
When you construct X, it will have normal priority, thus no robots will work on filling Y unless there's excess robots (say you have 200 robots), so 150 bots will handle the X and the other robots will start to deal with Y.

That would make sense to me, but still I don't think it's worthwhile implementing. I just can't see where we would use it. If something would need to be implemented in logistics, is colored networks.