Print Jobs Research Articles

Effective industrial modeling for high‐tech systems: The example of Happy Flow

AbstractIn the design of high‐tech systems like copiers, wafer steppers and televisions, modeling plays an important role. However, not all developed models are industrially successful. It would be very beneficial if guidelines were available on how to create industrially effective models that support the system architects and speed up the multi‐disciplinary design of high‐tech machines. In this paper, we describe a very successful industrial model in the context of the design of copiers. The model is developed for the design of the paper transport system (the mechanical layout of the paper track, the schedule of print jobs, sensors, actuators, etc.) in a multi‐functional office copier. As most other activities in the printer are synchronized to the paper transport system, this design issue is at the heart of the overall design and has a major influence on the total functioning of the machine. The so‐called Happy Flow model is based on kinematic modeling and its generic elements are not restricted to copiers only. Its main ideas are applicable to a much wider range of mechatronic products. It is important to learn from such instances of successful industrial models. The aim of this paper is to identify the success factors of this particular model, which forms a first step towards a more systematic method on how to construct industrial effective models.

E-Alliance: a Negotiation Infrastructure for Virtual Alliances

In this paper we provide an overview of E-Alliance, a software infrastructure we are developing to support negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organisational alliances. Our baseline is to offer a collaboration framework which fully preserves the autonomy of organisations grouped in an alliance, while enabling concurrency of their activities, flexibility of their negotiations and dynamic evolution of their environment. We propose to support negotiation between the partners within such alliances by combining different technologies, such as software engineering techniques, middleware-level coordination facilities and multiagent systems support. We present our approach in the context of a sample scenario of an alliance where partners are printshops capable of (out/in) sourcing print jobs among them to better accomplish their customers' requests.

Digital Color Printing: The New Business of Printing

This talk is about “The New Business of Printing™” and how it's transforming the industry and re-writing the rules of printing, and potentially creating tremendous market opportunity. The New Business of Printing™ is all about capturing fast-rising revenue streams and incremental volume driven by what customers face every day— fast turnarounds, precise quantities, personalization and customization. Aligned with a new set of business imperatives: the move from make-then-sell to sell-thenmake; from mass production to mass customization; and from local to global business. These imperatives create lucrative opportunities for printing that is done just in time, one-to-one, over the Internet.The trends and the challenges to capture the opportunities for producing printed materials in precise quantities with extremely fast turnaround— using variable text and graphics to create personalized, customized communications that address an audience of thousands, one at a time— with Internet services that provide global access to print services wherever and whenever they need them will be discussed.Market research has shown that customers want faster turnaround, shorter run lengths and digital solutions. Frank Romano of RIT says 33% of print jobs will require 24-hour turnaround within the next 3 years. Research shows 78% of all four-color print jobs have run lengths of less than 5,000, and analysts project digital color production prints will jump from 7 billion to 27 billion pages by 2004.Digital color printing continues to take the market by storm. It all began with 1st Generation digital color printing technology – a breakthrough five years ago, but has since been eclipsed in terms of speed and cost by 2nd Generation technology. This is where the action is today. 2nd Generation technology offers print speeds up to 75 ppm, low page costs of only 10 cents per page and high average print volumes. Just as the battle of the second generation is heating up, Xerox has already moved ahead with the DocuColor iGen3. This breakthrough third generation digital color printing technology attribute, that is a result of 1 billion in R&D investment, will be described in details. But the technology is only part of the story. Just as significant are the solutions, services and process innovations related to it, including new partnerships, content management, variable data and marketing initiatives.It is an exciting future. We see a high-end production market dominated by digital printing— both challenging as well as complementing offset technologies. We see dramatic new market opportunities driven by print-on-demand, customized content, one-to-one marketing, JIT and personalization. This future includes color in places it never existed before, where it was never affordable before. We see exciting new technologies like “EA” Toner, a new category of chemically produced dry inks that yield better quality and lower cost. So that's the future in The New Business of Printing™, but it's happening now.

The effect of process parameters on product quality of rotogravure printing

This paper describes an experimental investigation into the process parameter effects on product quality in rotogravure printing. A production printing press was instrumented for the measurement of parameters including strategic temperatures, speeds and web tension. Through-the-run analysis was used to evaluate the fluctuation of the press parameters and the product quality. The trials indicated the parameters where process control is important and allowed the elimination of several parameters, including ink drying, from the main experimental programme. The parameters selected for the main experiments were those most often used for control purposes, or those that were varied between print jobs. Orthogonal array experiments were used, as these allow the simultaneous variation of several parameters and the investigation of interactions between parameters. The experiments were performed using a typical commercial print run once the production of saleable copy had been completed. The analysis of the print quality was carried out in the image areas using spectrophotometry. The experiments highlighted the sensitivity of the process to changes in ink viscosity and the non-linearity of the response. Doctor blade setting was also found to be important, whereas blade load and impression pressure had negligible impact. No interactions were found between any of the parameters investigated. For viscosity change, analysis of the printed image confirmed the importance of hydrodynamic mechanisms, but it was not possible to isolate ink dilution. For doctor blade angular setting, hydrodynamic behaviour appears secondary to cell transport and release mechanisms. This latter mechanism requires further investigation in order to establish a clear understanding.

Sponsors of Literacy

the United States, Joseph Kett describes the intellectual atmosphere available to young apprentices who worked in the small, decentralized print shops of antebellum America. Because printers also were the solicitors and editors of what they published, their workshops served as lively incubators for literacy and political discourse. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, this learning space was disrupted when the invention of the steam press reorganized the economy of the print industry. Steam presses were so expensive that they required capital outlays beyond the means of many printers. As a result, print jobs were outsourced, the processes of editing and printing were split, and, in tight competition, print apprentices became low-paid mechanics with no more access to the multi-skilled environment of the craft-

Use of the transform exit sequence in printing and as a framework for the solution of complex problems

This paper is both a review of previous research and development and a description of new work for the IBM PSF/2 and PSF/6000™ printing products. These products are best characterized as complex queue drivers, originally designed to allow fast printers to be driven directly from the existing print subsystems of OS/2® and AIX®, respectively. The new work extends the capability of these products by providing a framework that broadly redefines the way in which “print queues” can relate to printers, other queues, and other programs, without requiring any changes to the spooling system. This technical advance is based on the twin ideas of the transform exit and the transform exit sequence, which are examined in detail. Using this technology, both PSF/2 and PSF/6000 treat the largest mainframe-attached printers as “local desktop printers,” allowing LAN communities to print directly on mainframe printers from LAN applications. Other interesting uses of this technology include routing print jobs to the printers appropriate for their data types, improvements in printer throughput, automated print-job archiving, and improved system management, each of which is covered in some detail in the paper. Although some of these solutions can also be provided by extending the capabilities of the spooling systems and some have been addressed in particular environments and applications, the transform exit sequence framework does not depend on changes to the spooling system, allowing it to be used in a wide variety of current and future operating systems.

Migration of processes, files, and virtual devices in the MDX operating system

Load management in distributed systems is usually focused on balancing process execution and communication load. Stress on storage media and I/O-devices is considered only indirectly or disregarded. For I/O-intensive processes this imposes severe restrictions on balancing algorithms: processes have to be placed relative to fixed allocated resources. Therefore, beyond process migration, there is a need for a migration of all operating system objects, like files, pipes, timers, virtual terminals, and print jobs. In addition to new options for balancing cpu loads, this also makes it possible to balance the loads associated with these objects like storage capacity or I/O-bandwidth.This paper presents a concept for a general migration of nearly all operating system objects of a UNIX environment. The migrations of these objects work all in the same UNIX compliant and transparent manner. Objects can be moved throughout a distributed system independently of each other and at any time, according to a user defined policy. The migration mechanism is implemented as part of the MDX operating system; we present performance measurements. We believe that most of the mechanism can also apply to other message-passing based distributed operating systems.