Optimizing Menu Planning for Children with Autism Using Improved Multi-Goal Programming Model

Menu planning for every individual is essential to obtain a balanced and healthy food intake for growth and development. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) face more feeding difficulties than their peers due to neurodevelopmental disorders such as social skills problems and repetitive behaviors. They also tended to refuse or be selective for certain food intakes. Proper menu planning for children with ASD is important to maintain their overall well-being and mitigate autism-related dietary issues. The manual menu planning for children with ASD does not consider proper nutritional intake, food variation, or total cost minimization. Currently, the application of mathematical modelling for menu planning in children with ASD is limited. Thus, this study aims to explore the extent to which the optimization approach can solve the menu planning problem with more than one objective. Finally, this research constructed daily menu planning for children with ASD, which indicates the feasibility of utilizing the Improved GP (IGP) model compared to the Goal Programming model (GP) in terms of the value for the deviational variables for the unachieved goals. The unachieved deviational variables by IGP model for Day-2 had decreased by 17.69% and by 34.43 % on Day-3. The total cost of the IGP model is also less than RM 0.50 of the GP model.