JOB RELEASE WITH MULTIPLE CONSTRAINTS

To schedule the release of jobs from a pool of pending jobs, machine information and information about items to be processed are used to determine available machine capacity. Available machine capacity is allocated to jobs subject to multiple job release constraints. Allocation may be performed first for any pending jobs which were partially released during a previous time interval, and then to new jobs in decreasing order of determined job rank. If different operative constraints dictate different numbers of units of a job to be released, the minimum number of units meeting each constraint may be released. After the number of units to be released has been determined for a job, machine information is updated to account for available capacity consumed by the release of the selected number of units of the job. Updated information may be used for job release scheduling of the next job.