Cooking-step scheduling algorithm for simultaneous cooking of multiple dishes

Nowadays, cooking everyday is hard for busy persons such as workers, students, and child-rearing families, because the time is limited on weekdays. At the same time, it is important for a healthy diet not to rely on eating-out and instant foods heavily. One solution to this situation is to cook dishes for the whole week on the weekend and eat them on the following weekdays. Then, the way of cooking with a good cooking-step schedule for multiple dishes is very important to save the time. In this chapter, we first propose a cooking model to estimate the cooking time accurately under various conditions including the kitchen layout and the number of cooks. Then, using this model, we propose a cooking-step scheduling algorithm for simultaneous cooking of multiple dishes under the cooking time constraint. Through experiments, we verify the effectiveness of our model and algorithm, where the cooking time difference between the model and the real cooking is only 2 min.