In any flexible manufacturing environment, like a Print Service Provider (PSP), there are fixed cost, related to job handling and machine set-up/cleaning. The Print Production is a complex environment where resources, devices and print jobs need to be coordinate and optimized to increase productivity and/or reduce cost.The inefficiencies can be significantly reduced, if production is analyzed as a whole and jobs are subject to optimization steps that streamline their production. The most common optimizations that can be performed are:• Planning. This allows identifying the required steps to produce the job, given the set of currently available devices.• Ganging. This operation physically places more than one job on a printed sheet or roll, enabling to significantly reduce job handling costs, paper waste and, if applicable mailing costs.• Batching. This operation serializes the order in which several jobs are processed. This tends to minimize the set-up and cleaning time at various devices, increasing efficiency.The proposed approach eliminates the need of having such optimization components installed at the PSP premises providing a Pay-as-You-Go solution [1] as well as leveraging 3rd parties data and capabilities.
Fabio Giannetti, "OaaS: Optimization as a Service" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP27), 2011, pp 128 - 131, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2011.27.1.art00033_1