Patent ID: 7921062

Claim:
A postal security device (PSD) allocation system comprising: a plurality of PSD pools, each of the pools associated with different PSD operations; and a PSD allocation device configured to assign by a computer processor each of a plurality of PSDs to one of the PSD pools based on at least one of: the status of the PSD and processing requirements of a computing system requesting PSD services, wherein, assigning the PSDs to one of the PSD pools comprises allocating at least one of the PSDs by the computer processor from a worker pool including a processing device configured to initialize the PSDs allocated to the worker pool, to an indicia pool of the plurality of PSD pools that is configured to perform separate functions from the worker pool including providing credit from PSDs allocated to the indicia pool usable for generating an indicia; wherein the allocating the at least one of the PSDs from the worker pool to the indicia pool is performed in response to an indicia queue for a required indicia, and is based on a current capacity of any PSDs already allocated to the indicia pool; and wherein the at least one of the PSDs is allocated to at least partially service the indicia queue.