A job profile oriented scheduling architecture for improving the throughput of industrial printing environments (original) (raw)
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Job profiling and queue management in high performance printing
Computer Science - Research and Development
Digital presses have consistently improved their speed in the past ten years. Meanwhile, the need for document personalization and customization has increased. As a consequence of these two facts, the traditional RIP (Raster Image Processing) process has become a highly demanding computational step in the print workflow. Print Service Providers (PSP) are now using multiple RIP engines and parallelization strategies to speed up the whole ripping process which is currently based on a per-page basis. Nevertheless, these strategies are not optimized in terms of ensuring the best Return On Investment (ROI) for the RIP engines. Depending on the input document jobs characteristics, the ripping step may not achieve the print-engine speed creating a unwanted bottleneck. The aim of this paper is to present a way to improve the ROI of PSPs proposing a profiling strategy which enables the optimal usage of RIPs for specific jobs features ensuring that jobs are always consumed at least at engine speed. The profiling strategy is based on a per-page analysis of input Portable Document Format (PDF) jobs identifying their key components. This work introduces a PDF Profiler tool aimed at extracting information from jobs and some metrics to predict a job ripping cost based on its profile. This information is extremely useful to rasterize jobs in a clever way. The computational cost estimated using the information extracted by the PDF Profiler and the proposed metrics is useful for the print jobs queue management to improve the allocated RIPs load balance, resulting in a higher throughput for the ripping step. Experiments have been carried out in order to evaluate the PDF Profiler, the proposed metrics and their impact in the print jobs queue management.
2009
The creation of personalized documents has become a common practice on digital printing area in the past few years. In order to deal with the growing demand, Print Shops Providers (PSPs) need to be able to print a large amount of documents in a short period of time. New languages to describe documents in uncomposed formats establishing the need for a pre-processing composition step (also called rendering step). This new step has introduced an additional computational cost for the whole printing process, what has become a critical issue on printing environments based on recent digital presses. In this scenario, the use of high performance strategies is an option to overcome those issues. Previous works introduced the use of parallel FOPs (Formatting Objects Processor) rendering engines to speed up the pre-processing of a single document. The current work describes a new, scalable and flexible approach to increase the throughput of the pre-processing phase and defines a consistent metric to estimate the computational cost to render a PPML document. With those advances, the authors point out as future work alternatives to develop a parallel solution, capable of scheduling the document jobs increasing the overall throughput.
Print Production Workflow Systems: An Algorithmic Implementation
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An innovation in technology has always ignited change for the people. Such changes have not only forced business processes to adopt new technology but also to change the business processes as well. The same has been seen in the print industry. Due to new concepts in technology and increasing use of internet, the industry is facing major challenges and one such challenge is survival. It is evident that run lengths for print is decreasing. But at the same time new opportunities are arising that includes embracing web-to-print, workflow systems and MIS for business survival and growth. This paper discusses such aspects of print industry and proposes a new cloud based print workflow model (PrettyPrint) that can leverage benefits to the print providers. The algorithms for the proposed model are illustrated and discussed.
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This paper addresses the production scheduling problem in a multi-page invoice printing system. The system comprises three stages: the stencil preparation stage, the page printing stage and the invoice assembly stage. Since each page can be considered as a component and the invoice as the finished product, the production system for multi-page invoices can be treated as an assembly-type flowshop with parallel machines at the last two stages. Moreover, two types of sequence-dependent setup operations are considered at the second stage. The objective is to minimize the makespan for all the invoice orders. We first formulate this problem into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). Then a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) is proposed for solving it due to its NP-hardness. To evaluate the performance of the HGA heuristic, a lower bound for the makespan is developed. Numerical experiment indicates that our algorithm can solve the problem efficiently and effectively.
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Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Document engineering - DocEng '04, 2004
Recent advances in digital press technology have enabled the creation of high-quality personalized documents, with the potential of generating an entire batch of one-of-a-kind documents. Even though digital presses are capable of printing such document sets as fast as they would print regular press jobs, raster image processing might possibly be performed for every different page in the job. Such process demands a large computational effort and it is therefore interesting to gather repeated images that are used throughout all documents and rasterize them as few times as possible. Moreover, performing such process separately from document production in the publishing workflow allows optimization to be performed prior to final printing, thus allowing it to take press hardware specifics into account, and reducing the time taken for it to produce the final output. This paper describes techniques to perform this task using PPML as the document description language, as well as the main issues concerning this kind of document optimization. Several gathering policies are described along with explanatory examples. We also provide and discuss experimental data supporting the use of such strategies.
Omega, 1999
This paper reports work done at Star Tribune, a leading metropolitan daily newspaper in Minnesota to improve integration among pressroom, mailroom and distribution operations. This work is subsequent to that already reported in IIE Transactions, which was focused on improving press operations only during the live-runs. An improved size-forecasting model is oered which allows preparation of more precise work-force schedules suciently in advance. Several system variabilities have been reduced by identifying homogeneous subclasses, and designing tailored operations for each subclass individually, and eliminating over-design to absorb between-class variabilities. Installation of¯ow sensors on presses has eliminated unnecessary over-production, and also allowed a better coordination between the press and the distribution operations. Installation of status sensors in equipment has allowed for collection of more reliable statistics on equipment utilizations, downtimes and so forth. They also have improved many aspects of capacity and operational planning. #
Formal Modeling and Scheduling of Datapaths of Digital Document Printers
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We apply three different modeling frameworks-timed automata (Uppaal), colored Petri nets and synchronous data flow-to model a challenging industrial case study that involves an existing stateof-the-art image processing pipeline. Each of the resulting models is used to derive schedules for multiple concurrent jobs in the presence of limited resources (processing units, memory, USB bandwidth,..). The three models and corresponding analysis results are compared.
Scheduling Solutions for the Paper Industry
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