An Island-Based Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm for Caloric-Restricted Diets

Abstract The most popular and successful way to maintain a healthy body is to have a rich and balanced diet, combined with physical exercise. Since it was proposed the diet dilemma, several works in the literature suggested calculating a diet that respects an individual's nutritional needs. In the Caloric-Restricted Diet Problem (CRDP), the goal is to find a reduced-calorie diet that meets an individual's dietary needs aiming for weight loss. This paper proposes a Hybrid Island-Based Evolutionary Algorithm (IBHEA) that combines a Genetic Algorithm (GA) with a Differential Evolution (DE) communicating through a migration policy to solve the CRDP. Computational experiments showed that IBHEA outperforms the non-distributed and non-hybrid implementations, generating a greater variety of diets with a small calorie count.