Patent ID: 7672006

Claim:
A multi-functional print platform, comprising: at least two marking engines that process information at different processing rates; and a scheduler that distributes portions of a job across the at least two marking engines based at least on a content of the job and the different processing rates of the at least two marking engines, and schedules job orders as a function of the inequality: [ ∑ i = 1 M ⁢ ( N pagesC ) / ∑ i = 1 M ⁢ ( N pagesBW ) ] / R ppmCppmBW < 1 , wherein N pagesC is a number of color pages and N pagesBW is a number of black and white pages for an ith job, R ppmCppmBW is a ratio of a color page per minute processing rate of a color marking engine to a black and white page per minute processing rate of a black and white marking engine, and M is a number of color buffers associated with the color marking engine.