Can I put material in pipeline at start of sim?

[RommelDAK]

Sorry if this is simple or addressed elsewhere, but I've searched this forum, Google, Sterman's Business Dynamics, and my Vensim manual and can't find an answer. I'm modeling the investment process and its contribution to the stock of productive capital actually online. There is obviously a delay (roughly 18-24 months) between those two. I've had no trouble setting that up, but when I simulate the model assumes that no investment had taken place prior to time zero. Hence, instead of new capital coming online continually throughout the simulation, the first addition doesn't take place until 18 months in.

My question is whether or not I can put stuff in the pipleline at the outset.

Thanks!

John

[bob@vensim.com]

If you are using a simple level with outflow = level/delay time then you would initialize

level = initial outflow * delay time

If you are using DELAY FIXED or DELAY MATERIAL the final argument should be the initial outflow.

If you want more control over the distribution of the outflow you will need to use either DELAY CONVEYOR which allows you to specify a distribution using a Lookup or possibly an aging chain where you can specify different initial contents for each of the levels.

Hope that helps.

[RommelDAK]

Thanks, Bob, I'll have a look at those options and see if I can find a way to address it. Up to this point, I've only ever delayed anything one time period and so it was easy enough to give one initial value. But I now need several in process. Sounds like one of these others might do it.