Hundreds of Quantum Applications

The future is quantum – this is precisely why NEC and CSIRO provided a breakdown of the importance of quantum. In this talk, NEC reveals its plans to drive higher sustained performance using D-Wave’s quantum technologies and how CSIRO is making leaps for solving material microstructure modeling with D-Wave Leap™.

Noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware is almost universally incompatible with full-scale optimization problems of practical importance which can have many variables and unwieldy objective functions. As a consequence, there is a growing body of literature that tests quantum algorithms on miniaturized versions of problems that arise in an operations research setting. Rather than taking this approach, we investigate a problem of substantial commercial value, multi-truck vehicle routing for supply chain logistics, at the scale used by a corporation in their operations. Such a problem is too complex to be fully embedded on any near-term quantum hardware or simulator; we avoid confronting this challenge by taking a hybrid workflow approach: we iteratively assign routes for trucks by generating a new binary optimization problem instance one truck at a time. Each instance has ∼2500 quadratic binary variables, putting it in a range that is feasible for NISQ quantum computing, especially quantum annealing hardware. We test our methods using simulated annealing and the D-Wave Hybrid solver as a place-holder in wait of quantum hardware developments. After feeding the vehicle routes suggested by these runs into a highly realistic classical supply chain simulation, we find excellent performance for the full supply chain. Our work gives a set of techniques that can be adopted in contexts beyond vehicle routing to apply NISQ devices in a hybrid fashion to large-scale problems of commercial interest.

Optimizing package loading within trucks for manufacturers and distributors can result in cost and time savings. In this talk, Senior Manager Nitish Umang discusses his joint work with D-Wave and show a demo for the 3D cuboid loading problem. This is a good candidate for quantum optimization due to the combinatorial nature of the problem.

Quantum annealing is a promising approach for obtaining good approximate solutions to difficult optimization problems. Folding a protein sequence into its minimum-energy structure represents such a problem. For testing new algorithms and technologies for this task, the minimal lattice-based HP model is well suited, as it represents a considerable challenge despite its simplicity. The HP model has favorable interactions between adjacent, not directly bound hydrophobic residues. Here, we develop a novel spin representation for lattice protein folding tailored for quantum annealing. With a distributed encoding onto the lattice, it differs from earlier attempts to fold lattice proteins on quantum annealers, which were based upon chain growth techniques. With our encoding, the Hamiltonian by design has the quadratic structure required for calculations on an Ising-type annealer, without having to introduce any auxiliary spin variables. This property greatly facilitates the study of long chains. The approach is robust to changes in the parameters required to constrain the spin system to chain-like configurations, and performs very well in terms of solution quality. The results are evaluated against existing exact results for HP chains with up to N=30 beads with 100% hit rate, thereby also outperforming classical simulated annealing. In addition, the method allows us to recover the lowest known energies for N=48 and N=64 HP chains, with similar hit rates. These results are obtained by the commonly used hybrid quantum-classical approach. For pure quantum annealing, our method successfully folds an N=14 HP chain. The calculations were performed on a D-Wave Advantage quantum annealer.

Computed tomography (CT) is an important imaging technique used in medical analysis of the internal structure of the human body. Previously, image segmentation methods were required after acquiring reconstructed CT images to obtain segmented CT images which made it susceptible to errors from both reconstruction and segmentation algorithms. However, this paper introduces a new approach using an advanced quantum optimization algorithm called quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO). This algorithm enables acquisition of segmented CT images from X-ray projection data with minimized discrepancies between experimentally obtained sinograms and quantized sinograms derived from quantized segmented CT images using the Radon transform. This study utilized D-Wave's hybrid solver system for verification on real-world X-ray data.

In this paper an application of D-Wave Systems quantum annealer for optimizing initial line-up of a soccer team is presented. Players and their playing position are selected to maximize the sum of players ratings for both a 4-3-3 attack formation and a 4-2-3-1 medium defensive formation. The problem is stated as a binary quadratic model (BQM) and it is solved in a D-Wave Leap Hybrid Solver. Results are presented and compared with already published results obtained with a classical solver.

Some business problems are better suited for quantum/hybrid technology than others. Watch this recording to find out how to identify and assess use cases and applications that would benefit from the use of quantum/hybrid resources.

Machine learning experts no longer need to be experts in optimization or hybrid solving in order to get the benefits of both. D-Wave's feature selection / machine learning tools enable access to the power of quantum hybrid to supercharge feature selection/ML workflows, and includes a plugin for scikit-learn.

Demand Side Response (DSR) is a strategy that enables consumers to actively participate in managing electricity demand. It aims to alleviate strain on the grid during high demand and promote a more balanced and efficient use of electricity resources. We implement DSR through discount scheduling, which involves offering discrete price incentives to consumers to adjust their electricity consumption patterns. Since we tailor the discounts to individual customers' consumption, the Discount Scheduling Problem (DSP) becomes a large combinatorial optimization task. Consequently, we adopt a hybrid quantum computing approach, using D-Wave's Leap Hybrid Cloud. We observe an indication that Leap performs better compared to Gurobi, a classical general-purpose optimizer, in our test setup. Furthermore, we propose a specialized decomposition algorithm for the DSP that significantly reduces the problem size, while maintaining an exceptional solution quality. We use a mix of synthetic data, generated based on real-world data, and real data to benchmark the performance of the different approaches.

Drug discovery is a high-risk, high-reward field, where a blockbuster therapy can deliver life-changing clinical benefits to millions of patients and generate billions of dollars in profit—but more than 90% of new drug development efforts ultimately prove fruitless. PolarisQB is using quantum computing with AI and precision medicine to search chemical space and create novel molecular drugs for specific proteins and diseases much more quickly than using traditional methods. In order to find a new preclinical lead candidate, the first step is to build a library of small molecules that may interact with the target protein binding pocket. Traditionally, library design involves wet lab testing that takes years, costs millions, and is limited to a narrow chemical space. With the power of D-Wave’s quantum technology, PolarisQB finds optimized molecules in days from a highly diverse library of 10^30 possibilities. This size of the library is 20 orders of magnitude bigger than the current industry standard.

Recently, the demand for the optimization of TV commercials (CMs) has been increasing. Specifically, it is important to determine the assignment of TVCMs so that each viewer watches the TVCMs with specific number of times. This problem is known as frequency control. By controlling the frequency of multiple TVCMs for each viewer, the message of TVCMs can be conveyed to the viewers in the intended way. In our project, we considered the problem to maximize the KPI which is the number of viewers who watch all kinds of TVCMs more than once. We solved the optimization problem and broadcasted the TVCMs based on the result of the optimization. We also compared the increase in the business KPI calculated using the actual viewing data for 3 different methods, CPLEX, D-Wave CQM, and an existing manual method. As a result, D-Wave CQM increased the KPI by 92% compared to an existing manual method, and it also outperformed CPLEX by 4%, which is a significant impact on our business. 

Annealing is a heuristic for solving optimization problems that have seen a recent surge in usage owing to the success of D-Wave Systems. This paper aims to find a good heuristic for solving the Electric Vehicle Charger Placement (EVCP) problem, a problem that stands to be very important given the costs of setting up an electric vehicle (EV) charger and the expected surge in electric vehicles across the world. The same problem statement can also be generalized to the optimal placement of any entity in a grid and can be explored for further uses. Finally, the authors introduce a novel heuristic combining Quantum Annealing and Genetic Algorithms to solve the problem. The proposed hybrid approach entails seeding the genetic algorithms with the results of quantum annealing. Experimental results show that this method decreases the minimum distance from Points of Interest (POI) by 42.89% compared to vanilla quantum annealing over the sample EVCP datasets.