Bot queues on chests
Posted: Sun Sep 15, 2019 9:03 pm
In FFF 309 one of the ideas mentioned was that bots could take up space/time so that large amounts of bots trying to occupy the same space cause traffic jams and so you can't just scale them indefinitely. Performance reasons are mentioned as the main reason for not doing it, as the current approach minimizes recalculations.
While it would have different effects, possibly an alternative would be having bots queue up for chests in the same way as they do for roboports. So each chest would have a maximum throughput in, say, bots/sec that could pick up or deposit items. A bot would still move to its destination with minimal intervening calculation, but then would have to wait for its turn, making traffic jams inefficient for the bots.
While it would have different effects, possibly an alternative would be having bots queue up for chests in the same way as they do for roboports. So each chest would have a maximum throughput in, say, bots/sec that could pick up or deposit items. A bot would still move to its destination with minimal intervening calculation, but then would have to wait for its turn, making traffic jams inefficient for the bots.