Critical infrastructures (CI)-including power grids, financial systems, communication networks, and transportation networks-are essential to societal stability and economic security. As these systems grow increasingly complex and interconnected, they face mounting challenges in scalability, robustness, real-time decision-making, and data privacy. While classical artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques have been applied to enhance CI monitoring, optimization, and control, they are often constrained by data heterogeneity, centralized architectures, and limited adaptability. Quantum computing (QC), known for its potential to solve certain computational problems exponentially faster than classical methods, has opened new possibilities in this domain. Quantum artificial intelligence (QAI), which combines quantum computing with AI techniques, offers transformative opportunities, particularly through paradigms such as federated quantum machine learning (FedQML) and quantum reinforcement learning (QRL). These approaches promise privacy-preserving distributed intelligence and dynamic control across CI systems. In this article, we survey recent developments in QAI and explore their applications in critical infrastructure domains. We also highlight key challenges and outline a forward-looking roadmap toward resilient, secure, and quantum-enhanced infrastructure systems.
Critical infrastructures (CI)-including power grids, financial systems, communication networks, and transportation networks-are essential to societal stability and economic security. As these systems grow increasingly complex and interconnected, they face mounting challenges in scalability, robustness, real-time decision-making, and data privacy. While classical artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques have been applied to enhance CI monitoring, optimization, and control, they are often constrained by data heterogeneity, centralized architectures, and limited adaptability. Quantum computing (QC), known for its potential to solve certain computational problems exponentially faster than classical methods, has opened new possibilities in this domain. Quantum artificial intelligence (QAI), which combines quantum computing with AI techniques, offers transformative opportunities, particularly through paradigms such as federated quantum machine learning (FedQML) and quantum reinforcement learning (QRL). These approaches promise privacy-preserving distributed intelligence and dynamic control across CI systems. In this article, we survey recent developments in QAI and explore their applications in critical infrastructure domains. We also highlight key challenges and outline a forward-looking roadmap toward resilient, secure, and quantum-enhanced infrastructure systems.
Mission critical (MC) applications such as defense operations, energy management, cybersecurity, and aerospace control require reliable, deterministic, and low-latency decision making under uncertainty. Although the classical Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are effective, they often struggle to meet the stringent constraints of robustness, timing, explainability, and safety in the MC domains. Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI), the fusion of artificial intelligence and quantum computing (QC), can potentially provide transformative solutions to the challenges faced by classical ML models. QAI is a broader umbrella than Quantum Machine Learning (QML) and additionally includes quantum optimization, search, and reasoning; we use QAI throughout the paper for the field at large, and QML only for learning-specific subroutines. The principal contributions of this work are: (i) a systematic survey of QAI methods analyzed through the lens of MC requirements like certification, robustness, and timing; (ii) a conceptual quantum cloud resource management and scheduling framework with deployment assumptions, complexity analysis, and failure-mode discussion; and (iii) an identification of the gaps between current QAI capabilities and MC systems requirements. We also propose a conceptual model for management of quantum resources and scheduling of applications driven by timeliness constraints. We discuss multiple challenges, including trainability limits, data access, and loading bottlenecks, verification of quantum components, and adversarial QAI. Finally, we outline future research directions toward achieving interpretable, scalable, and hardware-feasible QAI models for MC application deployment.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to drive innovation across industries, but faces mounting challenges in computational scalability, optimization, and interpretability as models grow increasingly complex. Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) offers a promising path forward by leveraging quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to augment learning processes beyond classical limits. This review synthesizes the recent progress in QAI, emphasizing a comparative perspective framed through its advantages and limitations. It examines how hybrid quantum-classical architectures and variational models seek to address constraints in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, and how applications in healthcare, finance, and cybersecurity illustrate both the potential and the barriers of the field. While several studies have broadly mapped the growth of QAI in algorithms and applications, this paper adopts a different perspective: emphasizing comparative analysis through advantages and limitations. The focus is on where QAI offers unique opportunities, where it encounters obstacles distinct from classical AI and quantum computing, and what research directions may transform these challenges into breakthroughs. By situating QAI within this comparative framework, the paper provides a realistic yet forward-looking assessment of its trajectory as a paradigm poised to reshape computational intelligence.
Quantum-Enhanced Artificial Intelligence (QAI) integrates quantum computing with advanced AI techniques to transform computational intelligence in next-generation systems. By leveraging quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement, QAI enables faster processing, improved optimization, and enhanced learning capabilities beyond classical limits. This study highlights hybrid quantum-classical models and quantum machine learning approaches that improve pattern recognition and decision-making across domains such as healthcare, finance, and automation. It also addresses key challenges, including hardware limitations, noise, and scalability, along with the need for secure and ethical frameworks. Overall, QAI offers a powerful pathway toward faster, more adaptive, and scalable intelligent systems, driving innovation and shaping the future of AI-driven industries.
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the field of quantum communication has emerged in recent years as a promising avenue for enhancing secure data transmission, error correction, and scalability in quantum networks. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of AI applications in quantum communication, with a focus on machine learning (ML) models such as neural networks and reinforcement learning, which are adapted to manage complex quantum challenges. Despite the growing body of research, current studies often concentrate on specific AI techniques or quantum applications, lacking a unified framework that evaluates their practical effectiveness, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Addressing this gap, our survey systematically reviews and categorizes AI-driven methodologies across core aspects like system security, transmission speed, and reliability. Through a critical comparison and ranking of existing techniques, this study identifies best practices and key advancements while highlighting areas requiring further exploration. By providing an in-depth analysis of AI's potential to transform quantum communication, this paper aims to serve as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to develop resilient, adaptive, and economically viable quantum communication systems.
Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) combines quantum computing with artificial intelligence (AI) to surpass the traditional barriers of classical computing systems, such as their inability to solve large-scale optimization problems or simulate complex quantum systems, which require exponentially increasing computational resources. Quantum computing, on the other hand, makes use of quantum mechanical phenomena of superposition, entanglement, and interference to process millions of data points in parallel, avoiding the exponential computation needed in many complex problems. QAI combines principles of quantum computing with AI techniques, thereby accelerating model learning. Some of the most notable applications include drug discovery in terms of exact predictions of molecular interactions, due to the enhancement of quantum simulations. There are cryptographic applications where QAI challenges classical encryption but also contains more advanced, non-breakable quantum cryptographic methods. In the same way as general advances in the field of data analysis and optimization, these domains would change: financial modeling, cybersecurity, and climate science. The biggest challenges remaining in scaling quantum hardware are noise and decoherence. Solutions will require major advances in quantum error correction, along with hybrid quantum-classical systems integrating the strengths of each. At this point, added to the list of critical concerns in the development of QAI are ethical considerations such as data privacy, algorithmic bias, and transparency. But all this notwithstanding, QAI has the transformative potential to solve problems that classical AI was unable to solve and drive innovation in domains ranging from healthcare and environmental science to cryptography and beyond. Unlocking its full capabilities and overcoming the resultant technical and ethical challenges is by way of further research and collaboration.
The convergence of quantum computing and artificial intelligence has introduced a new paradigm in computational science known as Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI). By leveraging quantum mechanical principles such as superposition, entanglement, and quantum parallelism, QAI aims to overcome the limitations of classical machine learning, particularly in handling high-dimensional data, complex optimization, and scalability issues. This paper presents a comprehensive review of foundational concepts in both classical machine learning and quantum computing, followed by an in-depth discussion of emerging quantum algorithms tailored for AI applications, such as quantum neural networks, quantum support vector machines, and variational quantum classifiers. We explore the practical implications of these approaches across key sectors, including healthcare, finance, cybersecurity, and logistics. Furthermore, we identify critical challenges related to hardware limitations, algorithmic stability, data encoding, and ethical considerations. Finally, we outline research directions necessary to advance the field, highlighting the transformative potential of QAI in shaping the next generation of intelligent technologies