Developing an Intelligent e-Restaurant With a Menu Recommender for Customer-Centric Service

Traditional restaurant service is typically passive: Waiters must interact with customers directly before processing their orders. However, a high-quality service system should be customer centered; it should immediately recognize customer identities, favorite menus, and expenditure records to provide customer-centric services. To achieve this goal, this study integrates radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless local area network, database technologies, and a menu recommender to develop an intelligent e-restaurant for customer-centric service. This system enables waiters to immediately identify customers via RFID-based membership cards and then actively recommend the most appropriate menus through menu recommender for customers. Experimental results that are obtained from a case study conducted in two Taipei restaurants indicate that the proposed system has practical potential in providing customer-centric service.