A Model of Dynamic Scheduling of Restaurant Operations Considering the Order and Timing of Serving Dishes

Japanese and French restaurants provide dishes in an order specified by tradition; for example, from appetizers to desserts. On the other hand, customers in a Japanese-style bar or casual restaurant often order several dishes at one time. They may have implicit preferences as to the order and timing of serving the dishes according to the characteristics of the foods and their situations. For example, light meals that can be served quickly tend to be served first to cater to customer desires. This paper proposes a dynamic scheduling approach for restaurant service operations considering the order and timing of serving dishes. Customers specify their requests for the order of serving dishes to floor staff, and then a model configures cooking and serving schedules dynamically according to the customers’ requests. In this paper, three models are proposed. In the first model, cooked dishes are stocked in a storage space until the customers’ requirements for the order have been satisfied. The second model coordinates cooking schedules by considering the order sequence, cooking time, and lot assignment to adapt to customer requirements. The third model combines the first and second models.