A diet planning model for Malaysian boarding school using zero-one integer programming

Humans 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. Moreover, it is essential for resisting and preventing diseases and infection that may lead to problems such as anaemia, scurvy and rickets. In recent studies, medical researchers have discovered that good nutrition can help to reduce the risks of coronary heart disease and certain types of cancer. Menu and diet planners face tremendous challenges and difficulties in order to improve human health. Serving healthier meals is a major step towards achieving that objective. However, constructing and 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 meets the necessary nutrient intake for the secondary school student as well as minimizing a budget. The data was collected fiom various boarding schools and also fiom the Ministry of Education. Diet planning .is a well known optimization problem and the goal is to find the best possible optimal solution. Therefore the model was solved by using optimisation method along with 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.

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