Simulation for document print management

摘要

Intelligent scheduling and coordination of print tasks has become a major challenge for printshops decision-makers given the dynamic nature of the job requests coming from customers and other printshops. Entirely automated solutions have proven difficult to implement in a real life environment as in other production management scheduling problems. The reason is that the parameters an automatic system would have to deal with and the constraints relating them are not always easy to explicit, and also these parameters are subject to frequent changes. Furthermore, automated solutions do not easily let decision-makers interact and bring their non-formalized knowledge into the process. In this paper we shortly describe how a simulation tool like Zippin can help decision-makers, allowing them to flexibly model, interactively simulate and explore work processes. Decision-makers can use simulation results to produce job schedules, organize the work locally at their printshop, negotiate time and costs with the customers, prepare subcontracting offers to other printshops, decide which jobs are worth outsourcing etc.