Modeling and assessment of production printing workflows using Petri nets

Abstract

Production printing workflow is a high-volume and high-speed printing process normally consisting of a set of complex and inter-related tasks namely pre-press, press and post-press procedures. Today many production printing vendors are increasingly offering heterogeneous devices and related software products that autonomously interoperate as a production printing workflow in a digital distributed environment. It is highly desirable in such environment that a detailed workflow assessment is performed either prior to the deployment or during real-time operations. A formal workflow model and assessment capability would ultimately benefit the customers who directly manage these production printing workflows to make better-informed decisions, understand the efficiency of to-be-purchased or already-deployed workflows, foresee the performance implications under a variety of business conditions. Therefore in this paper, we have developed formal workflow models (in both abstract and execution) based on the colored Petri nets [4] that incorporate production printing semantics. Based on these formal representations, we show how a production printing workflow can be assessed both analytically and quantitatively by leveraging existing Petri net tools. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.