This paper presents a novel hybrid approach to solving real-world drone routing problems by leveraging the capabilities of quantum computing. The proposed method, coined Quantum for Drone Routing (Q4DR), integrates the two most prominent paradigms in the field: quantum gate-based computing, through the Eclipse Qrisp programming language; and quantum annealers, by means of D-Wave System’s devices. The algorithm is divided into two different phases: an initial clustering phase executed using a Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), and a routing phase employing quantum annealers. The efficacy of Q4DR is demonstrated through three use cases of increasing complexity, each incorporating real-world constraints such as asymmetric costs, forbidden paths, and itinerant charging points. This research contributes to the growing body of work in quantum optimization, showcasing the practical applications of quantum computing in logistics and route planning.
This paper presents a novel hybrid approach to solving real-world drone routing problems by leveraging the capabilities of quantum computing. The proposed method, coined Quantum for Drone Routing (Q4DR), integrates the two most prominent paradigms in the field: quantum gate-based computing, through the Eclipse Qrisp programming language; and quantum annealers, by means of D-Wave System’s devices. The algorithm is divided into two different phases: an initial clustering phase executed using a Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), and a routing phase employing quantum annealers. The efficacy of Q4DR is demonstrated through three use cases of increasing complexity, each incorporating real-world constraints such as asymmetric costs, forbidden paths, and itinerant charging points. This research contributes to the growing body of work in quantum optimization, showcasing the practical applications of quantum computing in logistics and route planning.
Quantum computing (QC) stands at the cusp of revolutionizing computation, yet its near-term potential, constrained by Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, remains underexplored. This dissertation investigates how hybrid quantum-classical algorithms can address combinatorial optimization challenges in logistics, focusing on vehicle routing and drone delivery—NP-hard problems with exponential solution spaces that defy classical exhaustive methods. Amidst NISQ limitations like limited qubits and high noise, we confront key challenges: encoding complex constraints, e.g., time windows, battery capacity, into quantum models, balancing quantum and classical components for scalability, and accessing scarce quantum resources. By integrating quantum annealing (QA) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) with classical heuristics, this work demonstrates QC’s practical utility, advancing both optimization theory and real-world logistics applications. The dissertation unfolds across four core contributions. First, the Hybrid Quantum Tabu Search (HQTS) optimally solves the 50-location Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), achieving a 4.72% optimality gap. Secondly, we refine HQTS to reach a 2.15% gap with enhanced QA utilization, outperforming prior hybrids on standard datasets. Third, adapting HQTS for the CVRPTWwith D-Wave’s Constrained Quadratic Model solver yields a 3.85% gap on 100-location instances, leveraging a novel heuristic to ensure time-window feasibility where quantum outputs falter. Lastly, QUADRO, a pioneering framework for drone delivery, employs QAOA-driven routing and hybrid scheduling, minimizing transit time and makespan for fleets of 2–11 drones needing fewer than 100 qubits, rivaling classical benchmarks on adapted Augerat datasets. These advances, tested via D-Wave’s Advantage system and Qiskit simulations, showcase hybrid strategies that mitigate NISQ constraints, delivering scalable, feasible solutions to logistics challenges. This work establishes near-term QC’s viability for combinatorial optimization, bridging theoretical promise with practical impact. Synthesizing quantum exploration with classical refinement achieves competitive performance, e.g., matching or surpassing Google ORTools in select CVRPTW cases, while illuminating NISQ limits, such as feasibility degradation beyond small scales. These hybrid strategies deliver scalable, feasible solutions, from a 2.15% optimality gap for CVRP to effective drone fleet management with fewer than 100 qubits, illuminating quantum computing’s potential despite its current constraints. Ultimately, this dissertation positions hybrid QC as a transformative tool for optimization challenges, offering a robust foundation for scaling quantum optimization into operational reality.
The integration of drones into last-mile delivery operations has the potential to significantly enhance responsiveness and reduce delivery costs. In this paper, we study the Coordinated Truck-Drone Routing Problem (CTDRP), where a truck serves as mobile base station that launches and retrieves a drone to deliver to geographically dispersed customers. Some customers are served by the truck, while others are served by the drone. The objective is to optimize the truck route and drone assignments in order to minimize the total delivery distance, including both ground and aerial travel. We model the CTDRP as a combinatorial optimization problem and solve it using the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), a variational hybrid quantum-classical algorithm that offers promising capabilities for discrete optimization. The proposed method is benchmarked against classical solutions obtained using the Gurobi optimizer, and the results show that QAOA delivers competitive performance. These findings demonstrate the applicability of QAOA in solving integrated aerial-ground logistics problems and support its potential for advancing quantum-enhanced transportation systems.
This study investigates the application of quantum annealing in solving logistics and scheduling problems, areas traditionally challenged by combinatorial complexity. Using a case study approach, quantum annealing was applied to optimize delivery routing and job-shop scheduling problems. The methodology incorporated D-Wave's quantum processing unit (QPU), and performance was benchmarked against classical simulated annealing. Results indicate a significant improvement in computational efficiency and solution optimality, particularly for mid-sized problem instances. The research identifies key parameters influencing performance and provides insights into hybrid quantum-classical integration. These findings contribute to the growing field of quantum computing applications in operations research. Keywords: Quantum annealing, logistics optimization, scheduling algorithms, quantum computing, operations research
In this paper, we investigate a quantum approach to solve hard optimization problems of logistics, such as vehicle routing, warehouse scheduling, supply chain planning, etc. Employing quantum computation models, viz., Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) as well as hybrid quantum-classical computing framework, the proposed technique overcomes problems of scalability, constraint handling, and performance issues of previous work. The research demonstrates benchmarking on benchmarks, on logistics datasets, and across quantum platforms. We establish that the solution quality and the convergence efficiency were improved by considering the quantum annealing effect, showing that quantum computing is a revolutionary playing card in optimization for logistics.
We present annealing solutions for route optimization problems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), The route planning problem is a generalised version of the Travelling Salesman Problem which has many applications in logistics planning. Our annealing solutions combine classical algorithms with quantum/digital annealers specifically designed for quadratic optimization problems and shows improvements over generic traditional solvers such as Gurobi. We empirically test the solvability of our annealing solutions on both hand-crafted hard test cases as well as simulated ‘real-world’ examples of urban environments where the operations of the UAVs can be affected by the direction and intensity of wind, which is conditioned by the presence of buildings.
Logistics involves managing how resources are acquired, stored, and transported to their final destinations along the supply chain in a cost-effectively manner. Logistics problems are NP-hard combinational optimization problems involving searching for the best solution in a large solution space. Recent studies have demonstrated the capability of quantum methods to solve such combinatorial optimization problems. Consequently, this paper presents the application of quantum computing methods for two real-world logistics problems, namely, a) Employee transport route optimization and b) Agri-tech logistics optimization. The main goal of this paper is to present the evaluation of the results of the experiments executed on quantum gate-based variational algorithms and quantum annealers. Given the current limitation of quantum hardware, we had to simplify the problem and use case specific decomposition techniques such as distance based clustering to reduce the search space and size of the problem before executing them on quantum computers. The method has been elaborated in this paper. The results were benchmarked with classical exact solvers.