Lineking: coffee shop wait-time monitoring using smartphones

Abstract

This article describes LineKing, a crowdsensing system for monitoring and forecasting coffee shop line wait times. LineKing consists of a smartphone component that provides automatic and accurate wait-time detection, and a cloud backend that uses the collected data to provide accurate wait-time estimation. LineKing is used on a daily basis by hundreds of users to monitor the wait-times of a coffee shop in the University at Buffalo, SUNY. The novel wait-time estimation algorithms of LineKing deployed at the cloud backend provide median absolute errors of less than 3 minutes.