Colloquium: Dr. Krzysztof Domino | IITIS

ABSTRACT:      The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate current state of art and future perspective of application of quantum computing, and quantum annealing in particular, for optimization problems on the example of railway dispatching. Railway transport is one of most ecological form of transportation, hence to attract new clients railway system has to be competitive, i.e. reliable and resilient to disturbances. However, for efficient mitigation of disturbances large-scale problems have to be addressed by 

optimization, given little time for computation. It is in contradiction

with the fact, that such optimization problems can often be represented

as the Job-Shop problems with blocking constrains that are NP-hard.

     Quantum computing, and quantum annealing in particular give a

promise to solve such NP-hard problems in reasonable time. However,

currently we are in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) de-

vices’ stage. On the one hand quantum hardware has become available 

for real live problem, on the other hand results of computation on such

hardware are still noised and far form optimal. Hence, further work on

quantum devices and corresponding algorithms are necessary to overcome above mentioned curse of dimensionality for practical problems.

     In this presentation we will demonstrate first ever application of quan-

tum annealing for railways. Further, we will discuss difficulties that one

has to solve to achieve the advantage of quantum computation for opti-

mization in real live problems such as railways problems. In particular,

we will concentrate on coding quantum annealer, assessing results, and

the need of application of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. What is

important, we will discuss our research on first ever application of hy-

brid quantum-classical approach for solving real live railway dispatching

problems, and the quantum readiness, that we have demonstrated therein.