Constraint Satisfaction Methods for Solving the Staff Transfer Problem

Abstract

The Staff Transfer Problem is concerned with the assignment of transfer postings to employees in large organizations. Staff transfers are an important issue in Human Resource Management in countries like India and China that have many large public sector undertakings. The Staff Transfer Problem can be viewed as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem, and methods such as Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, Satisfiability (GSAT), and Conflict Directed Backjumping can all be employed to solve randomly generated problem instances. Computer experiments indicate that Simulated Annealing is the best method of solution. GSAT with a tabu list yields solutions of good quality but is unable to solve large instances. Genetic Algorithms is also good, but it takes much more time than Simulated Annealing, Conflict Directed Backjumping, a deterministic search technique, is markedly inferior to the other methods. Thus for solving the Staff Transfer Problem, randomized approaches appear to be superior to deterministic ones.