Main > frePPLe Tutorial > Your first model
Work in progress...
In this section you'll be introduced to the main modeling constructs and build a simple model.
Our sample company has 2 factories. In the first factory products can be manufactured, stored and then packaged. The second factory packages the products it gets shipped from the first factory.
Raw materials for the manufacturing are procured with a certain lead time from external suppliers.
We assume an infinite supply of the packaging material.
The customers can be supplied with products from both factories, and we prefer to deliver from the factory closest to the customer. Only when the preferred factory can't deliver in time is develiring from the other factory considered.

Save the data file for each entity on your computer, and import the file into your frePPLe model as described in point 2 of the previous step.
- Location
A location is a place where resources, buffers and operations are located. The locations could be physical or logical.
In the picture above the locations are marked as rectangle around a number of other entities.
location.csv - Item
An item represents an end product, intermediate product or a raw material.
item.csv - Operation
An operation represents an activity: it consumes and produces material, takes a certain time and also requires capacity.
The material consumption is modelled as a flow: see below.
The capacity consumption is modelled as a load: see below.
In the picture above the operations are shown as the red rectangles. - Buffer
A buffer is a storage for a item. It represents a place where inventory of an item is kept.
Operations consume material from or produce into buffers using flows: see below - Flow
Flows are used to model the consumption and production of material.
They create a link/assiocation between an operation and a buffer.
In the picture above the flows are visible as arrows between a buffer and an operation. Arrows from a buffer to an operation represent consumption of material, and arrows starting from operation represent material that is produced. - Resource
Resources represent capacity. They represent a machine, a worker or a group of workers, or some logical limits.
Operations consume capacity using loads: see below.
The picture above shows the name of the resource. - Load
Loads are used to model the capacity consumption of an operation.
They are displayed as a dashed line in the above picture. - Demand
Defines independent demands for items. These can be actual customer orders, or forecasted demands.
The actual demands are not shown in the above picture, but the operations (big red rectangles)you see on the right are the delivery operations that are planned to satisfy the demand.
In this example the delivery operations are alternate operations, modelling the choice to meet the demand from the 2 factories. - Verify the supply path
- If you didn't complete all of the above steps successfully, you're lucky: there is a fixture available that let's you catch up.
Open the menu item "execute" and hit the "erase" button. Next, select the "tutorial 1" dataset from the list and hit the "load" button.