Design and development of a web-based smart queuing system

• Main Author: Guo, Xun
• Other Authors: Shum Ping
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/75229
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Nowadays, waiting for service is a common phenomenon in restaurants during peak hours. Customer’s queuing time has been considered as a key factor when evaluating a restaurant to be good or not. A long queuing time could result in customers withdraw and move to another restaurant. Thus, reducing the unnecessary queuing time became a critical issue for the restaurant owners to promote customers’ satisfaction. Although the invitation of restaurant queuing machines helped to make it more convenient to queue, there are still large room for queuing time improvement. In this project, a creative and functional web-based smart queuing system was designed and developed to help the customers to make reservations and join the queue online, to acquire the estimated waiting time, and to receive notification messages of queuing progress. A PHP framework called ‘Laravel’ was adopted as the front-end development tool. The Apache server was used to browse the website via mobile devices. Database was utilized to store the queuing and reservation information. Besides, the study took a hotpot restaurant as a case to make it easier for the readers to understand the processes of the queuing system. Overall, this project helps to minimize the unnecessary waiting time of customers. The fast and efficient appointment scheduling enables customer to feel empowered and in control of their own time. Benefited from this system, fewer complaints will be received from customers due to long waiting time. In addition, the project gives suggestions on the proposed works of improving the queuing time to be done in the future.