Optimal Cooking Procedure Presentation System for Multiple Recipes and Investigating Its Effect

• Published in: Algorithms Vol. 14; no. 2; p. 67
• Main Authors: Nakabe, Jin, Mizumoto, Teruhiro, Suwa, Hirohiko, Yasumoto, Keiichi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2021
• Subjects: algorithm; Algorithms; Cooking; Critical path; Heuristic; Optimization; Optimization algorithms; Performance evaluation; Recipes; Scheduling; Task scheduling; task scheduling problem
• ISSN: 1999-4893; 1999-4893
• DOI: 10.3390/a14020067

As the number of users who cook their own food increases, there is increasing demand for an optimal cooking procedure for multiple dishes, but the optimal cooking procedure varies from user to user due to the difference of each user’s cooking skill and environment. In this paper, we propose a system of presenting optimal cooking procedures that enables parallel cooking of multiple recipes. We formulate the problem of deciding optimal cooking procedures as a task scheduling problem by creating a task graph for each recipe. To reduce execution time, we propose two extensions to the preprocessing and bounding operation of PDF/IHS, a sequential optimization algorithm for the task scheduling problem, each taking into account the cooking characteristics. We confirmed that the proposed algorithm can reduce execution time by up to 44% compared to the base PDF/IHS, and increase execution time by about 900 times even when the number of required searches increases by 10,000 times. In addition, through the experiment with three recipes for 10 participants each, it was confirmed that by following the optimal cooking procedure for a certain menu, the actual cooking time was reduced by up to 13 min (14.8% of the time when users cooked freely) compared to the time when users cooked freely.