Development and implementation of an e-restaurant for customer-centric service using WLAN and RFID technologies

Traditional restaurants only provide passive service where waiter can only deal with customer’s order by asking customer‘s need and then waits for answer. However, a high quality service system should be customer-centered, i.e., customer’s identity and therefore his/her favorite meals and expenditure records in past days can be immediately recognized by service system so as to provide customer-centric services. To achieve this goal, this study integrates RFID and wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies to implement an e-restaurant for customer-centric service, which enables waiters to immediately identify each customer via his/her own RFID-based membership card and then actively provides customized services. The user interface of the proposed system is built with Visual C# 2005 and eMbedded Visual C++, and the database is built on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for server management and statistic reporting. WLAN and RFID are used to transmit the real-time information of each dining table. Experimental result reveals that the proposed system has potential for practical application.