Recipe Enrichment: Knowledge Required for a Cooking Assistant

Nils Neumann, Sven Wachsmuth

Abstract: The preparation of a meal consisting of multiple components with different timing and critical synchronization points is a complex task. An automated system assisting a human in the preparation process needs to track the progress state, prompt the next recipe steps, control kitchen devices, monitor the final preparation time, and deal with process deviations. This requires a detailed process representation including knowledge about states with critical timing, control signals of devices, preparation steps and cooking times of ingredients, and necessary user attention. At the same time, the system should be flexible enough to allow the free combination of component recipes and kitchen devices to support the preparation of complete menus independent of a specific kitchen setup. To meet these requirements, we propose a method to automatically enrich simple component recipes with process-specific information. The resulting detailed process description can be processed by standard schedul