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.