Calendar based Event Trigger
Time Instant
Contrary to Time Span a Time Instant determines a specific point in time during the simulation. Since time instants can be specified in a very strict way, we do not have the influence of stochastics, at least not in this element. The "Time Instant" option can be selected in the drop-down menu at the top of the window.
You can define these time instants either as:
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a Recurring Time Instant (See Model 1c - Time Instants for Start Events from the Simulation Tutorial for an example)
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or you can script them yourself by choosing the Scripted Time Instants-option from the second drop-down menu at the top of the window.
Note that time instants can only be provided for events, especially general / timer start events. Activities do not support this feature.
Recurring Time Instant
The name says it all. These time instants recur at certain points of time, which have been specified before. See below for different methods on how to handle the finiteness (or in infiniteness) of the recurring.
The main approach is to select a start date (and time), then select the time unit for the recurrence (e. g. hours). Subsequently you will have to choose the span, (f. e. every 2 hours) . Afterwards you need to determine the end type, which can be open end, after a specific amount of recurrences or by a time at which the recurrences shall stop. See below for more information.
End - Open End
This one is quite simple. As mentioned before you need to choose the date, time, recurrence unit and span. In the example below we chose 1/1/2014, 8 AM and an hourly recurrence, which occurs every hour. We chose end type in the "End"-drop-down box, which means that there will be endless recurrences of this time instant. Well, the term endless is barely right, because the simulation stops at a given time.
