Mobile ticket dispenser system with waiting time prediction

A ticket dispenser (TD) is used to assist customers for the waiting process in, e.g., a shop. This paper deploys a mobile ticket dispenser system (MTDS) with waiting time prediction to enhance user experience in waiting. For example, the MTDS for a restaurant allows a customer to remotely draw a ticket for meal order anywhere through a smart phone before she/he arrives at the restaurant and therefore reduces her/his waiting time. We propose an output indicator and develop a discrete event simulation model to investigate the performance of the MTDS. Our study indicates that the waiting times can be more accurately predicted without consuming much wireless network resources and power consumption of mobile devices.