An extension of menu planning algorithm for two-phase homemade cooking

Nowadays, many people keep busy lives due to working in companies, studying in schools, or taking care of children or senior parents. As a result, it has become very hard for them to cook foods for suppers by themselves at home after long-hour duties at daytime in weekdays. Previously, to assist homemade cooking of such busy people, we proposed a two-phase cooking such that the preparation phase of cooking foods that they will eat on the following weekdays is performed on a weekend, and the finishing phase for the foods for a supper is completed on the day in short time. Then, we presented a menu planning algorithm to assist generating one-week menus for this two-phase cooking. Unfortunately, we found that this algorithm has the following drawbacks in practical use: 1) the selection of food preference is not easy, 2) the use of preferred ingredients for cooking cannot be directly specified, and 3) the nutrition balance of foods in a menu is not considered. In this paper, we extend this algorithm to solve them by newly defining a preference index and the food balance guide by Japanese government. We verify the effectiveness of the extended algorithm through generating five-day menus from 241 food candidates.