Patent ID: 7298501

Claim:
A method of assisting in the maintenance of media resources in a print system, the print system comprising a plurality of printer stations connected to at least one computer system by a computer network, wherein the method comprises: maintaining a first computer model representing print jobs which are to be processed on the print system at some future time, the first computer model including job data relating to the media resource requirements of each of the print jobs and a schedule of print jobs of the plurality of printer stations; maintaining a second computer model representing the up-to-date state of media resources present at each of the plurality of printer stations; determining if one or more media resources specified in the job data will be available for the print jobs, based on analysis of the job data in the first computer model and the media resources represented in the second computer model; generating a computer notification in the event that one or more media resources will not be available for one or more of the print jobs, the notification acting as a prompt to acquire new media resources; modifying the schedule in response to a change in the print system, the modification of the schedule comprising: making N copies of at least one of the models at the time the change in the print system occurs, wherein N is greater than one, applying a different simulated event management operation to each of said N copies to generate N predicted first end states of the print system, predicting a second end state of the print system as if the change in the print system had not occurred, and changing the schedule based on the first end state that is most similar to the second end state.