A Model of Nutrition Education for Multi-period Menu Planning Optimizations Using Estimation of Distribution Algorithm

Abstract

The menu planning problem deals with determining the dishes on a menu that satisfy some nutritional constraints, preferences of an individual, cost of food, etc. while optimizing the given objective functions. Many researchers have studied “one-period” menu planning problems with linear programming. However, our focus is on a “multi-period” menu planning problem as a combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we propose the model of nutrition education as the objective function for this problem. Our model of nutrition education employs entropy based on the menu diversity and order of appearance for the multi-period menu. We apply an estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) to optimize this problem and then show that our algorithm has better ability to find good solutions.