Design and development of microcontroller based electronic queue control systems

In this work, low-cost, portable microcontroller based electronic queue control (EQC) systems have been developed for the purpose of controlling queue in banking, hotel reservation counter, ticket counter, insurance company, customer service center etc. The aim of the designed systems is to maintain a queue with order and efficiency. Two different queue control systems have been implemented with slightly different features. In EQC system-1, a general display has been used for displaying token number and service counter number whereas in EQC system-2, each token number has been displayed individually in each service counter with separate displays. In the both systems, each customer has to collect a token and then will be served whenever the token number is displayed. The systems were designed around a 16F72 IC, a low-cost 8-bit PIC microcontroller and entirely software controlled. The control programs have been developed using the PIC assembly language. Finally, the systems have been tested under different conditions to evaluate their performance.