Xerox Corporation

Laurent Donini

Victor Ciriza

Guillaume M Bouchard

Pascal Valobra

Christopher R Dance

A system and a method of providing a time-out for a device, such as a printer are provided. The time-out determines when the device is shifted from a higher energy to a lower energy mode, absent the arrival of another job to be processed by the device. The method includes acquiring data comprising a set of inter-arrival times for at least one device over a period of time, such as a week and, for each of a set of candidate time-outs, deriving a probability from the data that an inter-arrival time from the set of inter-arrival times is greater than the candidate time-out. A cost function is computed, based on the derived probability and a robustness term which allows adversarial action not predicted by the histogram to be taken into account. A time-out for the at least one device can then be identified for which the cost function is a minimum.

Printer time-out

Systems and methods are described that facilitate using end-user feedback to automatically distinguish between a normal behavior and a device failure which can be a hard failure (e.g., a device malfunction) or a soft failure. For instance, upon detection of a usage switch from a first device to a second device by a user, a survey message is sent to the user to solicit information regarding the reasons for the switch. If the switch was triggered by a device malfunction, the detected device failure is verified and an alert is sent to an administrator and/or potentially impacted users. If the switch was triggered by the user's need for functionality (e.g., color printing, collation, etc.) not provided by the first device, which is otherwise functioning properly, then the detected failure is determined to be a failure and the failure detection algorithm is updated accordingly.

System and method for improving failure detection using collective intelligence with end-user feedback

As set forth herein, a system identifies soft failures of devices. An interface captures transactional data between one or more users and one or more devices within the system. A data log receives the transactional data from the interface and stores the data as historical data for subsequent retrieval. A warning system evaluates the historical data in the data log to identify one or more devices that have a soft failure condition, wherein an alarm is output for each soft failure identified. A display module combines the historical data from the data log and one or more alarms from the warning system into a single display for review.

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Grenoble, France

Laurent Donini