![]() When things get hectic you’ve got the spare capacity to handle things with ease. Leaving some slack in your ‘production line’ is often the best course of action. It’s okay for non-constraint lines to have empty trains, as long as the constraint line continually has passengers waiting. It’s okay to have a spare locomotive or a spare line ‘in the yard’ and not on the board. “what subordination looks like is all but one of the resources having idle time” Now we look at the non-constraints and subordinate their decisions to the constraint. If most of the traffic is headed in one direction, use a loop to make sure the trains are carrying passengers more of the time.Can the ordering of stations, or direction of trains be optimized to promote efficiency?.Shorten the line to allow the locomotive to cycle through stations faster.Additional trains (capacity) are rare and expensive.Īn optimized Mini Metro line has all of its trains full of passengers as often as possible. We do everything we can to optimize the constraint before adding capacity. Here we focus our efforts on the constraint. Remember that the whole process is iterative. If you aren’t sure where the constraint is, make a best guess. Passenger buildup at the Triangle station indicates our constraint is probably the Red Line ![]() Lines containing rarer stations like squares, crosses, or diamonds will collect passengers quickly. In Mini Metro, there’s usually a line that’s constantly at risk of overcrowding. We want to figure out where the constraint is. We can use the Five Focusing Steps as a decent playing strategy for Mini Metro, and in turn, use Mini Metro as a decent way to practice the Five Focusing Steps.įor a deeper exploration of these ideas, check out Theory of Constraints 106: The Five Focusing Steps. ![]() The Goal contains an iterative method for resolving constraints called The Five Focusing Steps. Using The Five Focusing Steps to Get a New High Score This forces you into an iterative approach. Just like real life the system continuously changes.Because it’s a game, we can practice more quickly and with less risk than a real-world situation.Overcrowding is explicitly punished, an equivalent to having too much inventory.Built in visual identifiers of flow help you quickly identify bottlenecks.While on the surface it’s just a game, Mini Metro is actually a great sandbox for practicing Goldratt’s ideas. The Goal is a great book, but the best way to learn the concepts is to use them in the real world. Attempting to improve throughput anywhere besides the constraint makes the problem worse. TOC posits: in any system, there is at least one constraint holding back throughput. In The Goal , Eliyahu Goldratt explores the Theory of Constraints (TOC). If only Alex knew about the Theory of Constraints! He could start by reading Theory of Constraints 101: Table of Contents. The passengers of Mini-London are fed up with the poor service. All Alex can do is pray he can stay in the game long enough to get capacity upgrades. He drags locomotives and carriages between lines, hoping to assuage the crush of passengers. Now Alex is in full reactive mode, putting out fires all over the map. Impatient passengers ping with an angry tone instead of their earlier pleasantries. The music that earlier was so soothing begins to speed up. At first it’s no problem, but soon the relaxing atmosphere starts to disappear. More stations are added, and Alex extends his lines to service new passengers. Each time a passenger reaches her destination, a subtle ping adds layers to the subtle background music. Trains shuttle between circle, triangle, and square stations with a relaxing electric hum. The clean, minimalist game promises to be a nice reprieve from his overwhelming day.Īlex loads up Mini-London and connects the first few stations. Alex has loved trains since childhood, so he is delighted when he discovers Mini Metro. Hoping to unwind, he decides to try a new game. By James Stuber the Plant Manager has returned home from a hectic day at the factory.
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