Dietary Menu Planning Using an Evolutionary Method

Optimization problems arise naturally in many different disciplines. One of them is nutrition. There is an interesting problem of dietary menu planning, where the goal, or objective, may be to maximize the number of seasonal and functional foods and to minimize the cost and deviations from uniformly distributed aesthetic standards for taste, consistency, color, temperature, shape, and method of preparation. In addition, there are other requirements, or constraints, dictated by the diet-planning principles that must be met. Some of the objectives and the constraints may conflict with others making the problem even more intractable. In this paper, we introduce a multi-objective and multi-constrained evolutionary algorithm for multi-level menu planning that quickly finds a diverse set of feasible solutions - nutritionally and gastronomically adequate menus - with the lowest objective function values without examining all possibilities