WARP (Workflow for Automated and Rapid Production): A framework for end-to-end automated digital print workflows

摘要

Publishing industry is experiencing a major paradigm shift with the advent of digital publishing technologies. A large number of components in the publishing and print production workflow are transformed in this shift. However, the process as a whole requires a great deal of human intervention for decision making and for resolving exceptions during job execution. Furthermore, a majority of the best-of-breed applications for publishing and print production are intrinsically designed and developed to be driven by humans. Thus, the human-intensive nature of the current prepress process accounts for a very significant amount of the overhead costs in fulfillment of jobs on press. It is a challenge to automate the functionality of applications built with the model of human driven exectution. Another challenge is to orchestrate various components in the publishing and print production pipeline such that they work in a seamless manner to enable the system to perform automatic detection of potential failures and take corrective actions in a proactive manner. Thus, there is a great need for a coherent and unifying workflow architecture that streamlines the process and automates it as a whole in order to create an end-to-end digital automated print production workflow that does not involve any human intervention. This paper describes an architecture and building blocks that lay the foundation for a plurality of automated print production workflows.