Performances in GA-based menu production for hospital meals

One of the approaches for improving quality of life of patients, undergoing hospitalization, is to improve hospital meals that are provided to them. It is a very cumbersome task to plan daily menus for hospital meals, which have many conditions for nutrition and allergies, and this task becomes difficult if patients´ preferences of foods are also considered for enhancing patients´ quality of life. This task can be formulated as an optimization problem with menu items as variables and specific nutritional and allergic as its constraints. We have proposed a menu creation scheme to satisfy these conditions with being incorporated patients´ food preferences, and shows a preliminary result for creating menus for a patient. A genetic algorithm was utilized to better and more efficiently locate combinations of menu dishes for individual patients. This paper shows that a variety of menus can be produced for patients with several ranges of ages, three types of physical activities, and allergic conditions.