Patent ID: 8144364

Claim:
A production printing system for processing a plurality of print jobs, the production printing system comprising: a plurality of print job processing devices; a computing device in communication with the plurality of print job processing devices; and a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium in communication with the computing device, wherein the computer-readable storage medium comprises one or more programming instructions for: identifying a print job size distribution for a plurality of print jobs in a document production environment, wherein the print job size distribution has a minimum print job size value and a maximum print job size value; determining whether the print job size distribution exhibits a heavy-tail characteristic; for each print job size distribution exhibiting a heavy-tail characteristic, grouping the plurality of print jobs into a plurality of subgroups such that at least one of the plurality of subgroups exhibits a non-heavy-tail characteristic, wherein grouping the plurality of print jobs comprises: selecting a job size threshold value between the minimum print job size value and the maximum print job size value, splitting the print job size distribution into a first distribution segment and a second distribution segment based on the selected job size threshold value, and determining whether the first distribution segment exhibits a heavy-tail characteristic; and processing each job in the at least one of the plurality of subgroups exhibiting the non-heavy-tail characteristics with one or more of the print job processing devices.