Choice Function-based Constructive Hyper-Heuristic for Generating Personalized Healthy Menu Recommendations

Abstract

This paper presents a Choice Function-based Constructive Hyper-Heuristic for generating personalized healthy menu recommendations based on a person’s nutrition, price and delivery time constraints. We model the problem of generating personalized healthy menus as an optimization problem for which the search space consists of a set of food packages, the solution is represented as a menu containing five food packages for each meal of the day, and the fitness function evaluates the degree to which a menu personalizes a person’s profile. In each step of the proposed hyper-heuristic’s iterative phase, a low level domain independent heuristic is chosen to be applied on the current menu, based on its affinity and competence. The hyper-heuristic has been evaluated on a set of persons’ profiles and a set of food packages developed in-house.