I'm developing a mobile application with an algorithm. It's about food.
So I have a database that contains some meals. A meal contains several foods. A food is an item like an Apple, and it contains the nutrient values of the apple. A Meal for example could be an apple pie, which contains apples, sugar, etc...
Each Food in a meal has a minimum and maximum amount, to make them more flexible. So when im making pasta with sauce, you can put in 150-250g of pasta and 50-75ml of sauce.
GOAL: The Algorithm is supposed to take in some values for total daily intake of carbohydrates, protein and fats. Then it should do some kind of algorithm to figure out a good combination of meals to best match the expectations of daily carbohydrates, proteins and fats.
While finding a solution, the algorithm can swap out meals, change the scaling of the foods inside the meals, and with n meals per day, and n foods per meal, that's quite a lot of variables.
I've tried a genetic algorithm approach, but I couldn't find a way to properly pair 2 solutions to make a child, and I couldn't figure out a good way for mutation.
Any help is appreciated, I don't want any code, just some inspiration at what i should look at, I'm not afraid of reading something (if it's not a book^^).
Or if anyone has an approach on how to handle this problem, that would be very nice aswell!