Configuration Space Exploration for Digital Printing Systems

Abstract

Within the printing industry, much of the variety in printed applications comes from the variety in finishing. Finishing comprises the processing of sheets of paper after being printed, e.g. to form books. The configuration space of finishers, i.e. all possible configurations given the available features and hardware capabilities, are large. Current control software minimally assists operators in finding useful configurations. Using a classical modelling and integration approach to support a variety of configuration spaces is suboptimal with respect to operatability, development time, and maintenance burden.In this paper, we explore the use of a modeling language for finishers to realize optimizing decision making over configuration parameters in a systematic way and to reduce development time by generating control software from models.We present CSX, a domain-specific language for high-level declarative specification of finishers that supports specification of the configuration parameters and the automated exploration of the configuration space of finishers. The language serves as an interface to constraint solving, i.e., we use low-level SMT constraint solving to find configurations for high-level specifications. We present a denotational semantics that expresses a translation of CSX specifications to SMT constraints. We describe the implementation of the CSX compiler and the CSX programming environment (IDE), which supports well-formedness checking, inhabitance checking, and interactive configuration space exploration. We evaluate CSX by modelling two realistic finishers. Benchmarks show that CSX has practical performance (<1s) for several scenarios of configuration space exploration.

Taming complexity of industrial printing systems using a constraint‐based DSL: An industrial experience report

“…Previously, we have developed CSX 1 : a language and environment that serves as an interface to constraint programming specific to the printing domain, abstracting over the complexity of developing control software in two ways. First, CSX offers domain‐specific constructs that abstract over low‐level details.…”

“…The deployment of CSX with code generation for communication with embedded software in devices and the integration with user interfaces is future work. For further details about the semantics and implementation of CSX 1.0, we refer to our previous work 1 . The technical contribution of the current paper focusses on extending the coverage of CSX within the existing framework, which we discuss next.…”

“…For a domain‐specific language such as CSX to be successful, it is crucial that the language's constructs are adequate in covering the printing domain. Although CSX 1.0 was found to be suitable in modelling realistic printing systems and to realize configuration space exploration with practical performance, 1 further application of the language on more printing systems revealed limitations of the approach. We discuss three coverage gaps in this section, for which we extend the language in the following section.…”

“…For further details about the semantics and implementation of CSX 1.0, we refer to our previous work. 1 The technical contribution of the current paper focusses on extending the coverage of CSX within the existing framework, which we discuss next.…”

“…In previous work, we have developed CSX (Configuration Space eXploration), 1 a DSL for modelling digital printing systems, automatically generating constraint models from device models, mapping solutions back to the domain of printing configurations, and deriving environments for configuration space exploration. Figure 1 depicts the translation of CSX to constraints and the mapping of a solution to a device configuration for an example model.…”