Patent ID: 8477333

Claim:
A xerographic printing system comprising: a plurality of interconnected processing units including one or more xerographic marking engines, the interconnected processing units defining a plurality of sheet processing paths terminating at a hopper and a print media destination; a jobs scheduler scheduling print jobs non-sequentially in a first order to a plurality of concurrent sub-jobs of a continuous sequential job stream that corresponds to one print job using a utility function based on dwell time and a system model indicative of the plurality of interconnected processing units, the plurality of sub-jobs employing one or more of the plurality of sheet processing paths including at least one pre-print batch and at least one direct print batch; a sheet itineraries processor that causes the plurality of interconnected processing units to concurrently move sheets of the concurrent sub-jobs along selected sheet processing paths to process the sheets and to independently deliver the at least one pre-print batch to the hopper and to sequentially deliver the at least one direct print batch to the destination wherein the at least one pre-print batch is collated in a second order with the at least one direct print batch; the jobs scheduler comprises a function optimizer that compares the dwell time of each of the plurality of sub-jobs within the job stream; and, wherein the function optimizer (i) compares the dwell time for each possible schedule of print sub-jobs to the plurality of sub-jobs and (ii) selects the schedule of pre-print sub-jobs and direct print sub-jobs that minimizes the overall dwell time of the job stream.