Patent ID: 8463416

Claim:
A printing system, comprising: one or more xerographic components that execute plans to process jobs; a planner that receives multiple batches of job requests for concurrent parallel processing; a plurality of parallel planning queues, each of which is associated with a batch and comprises an unplanned subqueue that stores unplanned job requests for its batch, an unsent subqueue that stores planned jobs that have not been output for execution, and a sent subqueue that stores planned jobs that have been output for execution; and a queue evaluator that identifies an unsent subqueue having a shortest length relative to other unsent subqueues and identifies a job request in the unplanned subqueue in the same planning queue as the shortest unsent subqueue; and a memory that stores one or more computer-executable routines that are executed by the planner and the queue evaluator; wherein the planner generates a plan for executing the identified job request, and advances the job request from the unplanned subqueue to the unsent subqueue upon generating the plan for the job request.