GAs with escape from stagnation of search for multiset iteration permutations problem – consecutive meals planning

In this paper, consecutive meals planning is formulated as a multiset iteration permutation problem that determines the optimal meals plan on a period consisting of consecutive days. In this problem, a meal is characterized by some characteristics such as food style, ingredient, cooking method, and so on. The evaluation function is defined by use of information entropy for measuring the appearance order of meal's characteristics on the meals plan. For optimizing this problem, Genetic Algorithms (GAs) with escape from stagnation of search are proposed. It is empirically shown that the proposed GAs with escape operation work better than the conventional permutation GA without escape operation for small and large size optimization problems.