WalkSAT approach in solving the staff transfer problem

Staff transfer is an important issue in human resource management. It is concerned with the assignment of transfer postings to employees in large organizations. A large organization has offices and work sites at multiple locations and it is customary to transfer a subset of employees at periodic intervals. The staff transfer problem (STP) can be viewed as a constraint satisfaction problem(CSP). The deterministic methods were proved to be inferior to local search methods in solving this problem. In earlier investigation GSAT(L) easily outperformed the simulated annealing (SA) which was the then best among all approaches. In this work computer experiments indicate that WalkSAT(L,p) easily outperforms GSAT(L) in most of the instances.