Optimal seat allocation strategy for e-sports gaming center

This paper investigates the seat allocation issues for an e-sports gaming center where people generally visit in groups to play games while eating. According to the data analysis, as the number of customers in a group gets larger, the revenue per person tends to get higher. The data analysis to identify the information, such as revenue and the stay time of customers is conducted, and operations research is applied to derive the optimal seat allocation strategy. Through a numerical experiment with actual data, it is discovered that small groups of customers can also be prioritized in the same way as groups with larger numbers due to the fluctuating revenue generated by each group of customers during every timeslot. Furthermore, the opportunity cost that occurs by blocking customers even if there are available seats to accommodate the larger groups of customers who provide bigger revenue at various timeslots is considered.