Abstract:

In traditional way of meal ordering process at a restaurant, firstly customers browse through the restaurant menu and then they wait for a waiter to come and take their orders. This procedure can be slow and decrease customer satisfaction during busy hours. Moreover, it is prone to human made mistakes. Automated systems can be used to optimize procedures by means of minimizing human made mistakes, decreasing waste of paper and thus making ordering procedures more time and cost efficient. There have been numerous attempts to automate ordering process in restaurants in recent years. For example, having a tablet PC on each restaurant table is one of the most popular solutions in the market while it is not cost effective since it requires many tablets. In this paper, we have designed and implemented an automation solution which benefits from WiFi’s captive portal feature on mobile device of restaurant customers. In the proposed system, customers just need to connect restaurant’s open WiFi from their table without waiting for a waiter to come and take their orders. Once their connection succeeds, customers will be directly forwarded to the web page on cloud server where they can browse through a menu and submit their orders without installing any application or any change in their mobile device. Each customer is identified by their WiFi card’s MAC address which is reported to cloud server by lightweight software that runs on WiFi access point (AP) together with their received signal strength (RSSI) level and restaurant identification code. System is designed to scale easily to multiple restaurants placing configured WiFi AP on each restaurant using same cloud server. Our proposed system provides an easy to use solution for restaurant customers and a cost effective solution for restaurant owners as they can utilize their human resources more efficiently.

Keywords: