SAT approaches for solving the Staff Transfer Problem

The Staff Transfer Problem (STP) relates to human resource flow in large organizations that have offices and worksites at many locations. Specifically, it is concerned with the periodic transfer of a subset of employees to different postings, either at another location or in a different workgroup in the same location. STP can be viewed as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). Deterministic methods for solving the STP have been found to be markedly inferior to local search methods for problem instances that are large enough to be of practical interest. In earlier experimental investigations, it was demonstrated that GSAT(L) outperformed Simulated Annealing (SA) on randomly generated instances of the problem. It has been discovered subsequently that in most cases WALKSAT(L,p) is superior to GSAT(L) and all other SAT approaches.