An approach to cooking process scheduling for a family restaurant

Abstract

The quality of service at restaurants depends not only on the quality of dishes served but also on the waiting time and the timing of when the dishes are provided. For high quality service, scheduling the cooking processes of the ordered dishes is needed. This scheduling problem can be regarded as a kind of job shop scheduling. When many orders pour in at about the same time, and when the number of dishes requiring serving increases, arranging the cooking processes so as to keep the quality of food and service becomes difficult. This paper clarifies a cooking process scheduling model and establishes a basic algorithm. This cooking process scheduling needs to be online because it decides which cooking process is executed at the time when a cook becomes idle or new orders are received. Thus, we use dispatching rules that evaluate the priorities of all jobs not yet executed and that select one job to start next. We first compare dispatching rules for four pieces of order information taken from actual orders by customers. The result showed that the SLACK rule performed superiorly for our order information. We next propose three scheduling methods, taking account of slightly prospective situations in order to make a preferred schedule in which multiple dishes are served at the same time for the same table. The proposed methods worked well for the service of providing dishes at the same time for our data, although the effectiveness of the proposed methods was greatly influenced by the characteristics of the order information.

Keywords

• cooking process scheduling
• online scheduling
• dispatching rule
• service quality
• job shop scheduling