A cooking-step scheduling algorithm with guidance system for homemade cooking

Abstract

Homemade cooking plays a key role for a healthy and cost-efficient life. Unfortunately, preparing multiple dishes is generally time-consuming. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to minimize the cooking time by scheduling the cooking-step of multiple dishes. The cooking procedure of a dish is divided into a sequence of six types of cooking-steps to consider the constraints in cooks and cooking utensils in a kitchen. A cooking model is presented to optimize the cooking-step schedule and estimate the cooking time for a given starting order of dishes under various constraints of cooks and utensils. Then, a high-quality schedule is sought by repeating the generation of a new order and the model application based on exhaustive search and simulated annealing. Our simulation results and cooking experiments confirm the effectiveness of our proposal.