Planning a Nutritious and Healthy Menu For Malaysian School Children Aged 13-18 Using "Delete-reshuffle Algorithm" in Binary Integer Programming

Abstract

A B S T R A C TTeenagers need to eat a good and balanced nutritious diet that provides calories for energy requirement and nutrients for proper growth, repair and maintenance of the body tissues and preventing diseases and infection such as anaemia, scurvy and rickets. Serving healthier meals is a major step towards achieving that objective. However, planning a nutritious and balance menu manually is complicated, inefficient and time-consuming. This study aims to develop a mathematical model for diet planning that optimizes and meets the necessary nutrient intake for student aged 13-18 as well as minimizing a budget. The data was collected from the Ministry of Education. Diet planning is a well-known optimization problem. Therefore the model was solved by using Binary Integer Linear Programming and "Delete-Shuffle Algorithm". This model can be adopted to solve other diet planning problem such as for the military, hospitals nursing home and universities.