US Patent 8230248 Printer time-out

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.