Runway

Inspiration

Every Saturday night, independent restaurant owners watch prospective guests walk away from crowded host stands while two-person parties sit stranded at fixed four-top tables. Operators constantly wonder if converting four-tops into combinable two-tops would seat more guests, but answering that question historically required expensive consultants or risky trial-and-error. We built Runway to give restaurant owners a deterministic simulator to test table reconfigurations against their own POS history before moving a single physical table.

What it does

Runway is a client-only dining room simulator and 7-day demand radar built specifically for independent full-service restaurants. Operators drag and configure combinable table layouts, ingest Toast or Square check exports in browser memory, and run a 200-night paired Monte Carlo simulation using common random numbers. The platform delivers instant executive takeaways on wait times and recovered covers, backed by a minute-by-minute floor plan replay and live National Weather Service demand forecasting.

Challenges I ran into

POS check-open timestamps reflect when a server opened a tab rather than when a customer joined the queue, and POS records never log the guests who walked away. We solved this censoring challenge by strictly separating historical occupancy reconstructions from counterfactual demand generation so the engine never overclaims precision. Additionally, optimizing dynamic table-combination constraint algorithms to run hundreds of simulation passes in the browser without freezing the UI required relentless matrix pre-indexing.

What's next for Runway

We plan to integrate automated table layout optimization algorithms that suggest the mathematically optimal table mix for any room dimension and party-size distribution. We also want to support direct POS integrations and patio seasonality toggles for summer dining.

Built With

• discrete-event-simulation
• gemini-api
• google-gemini
• monte-carlo-simulation
• nws-api
• pos-analytics
• react
• svg
• tailwindcss
• typescript
• vite
• vitest
• weather-gov-api
• zustand