Towards Finding an Optimal Flight Gate Assignment on a Digital Quantum Computer

Understand

We investigate the performance of the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for the optimal flight gate assignment problem.

• This problem is a combinatorial optimization problem that aims at finding an optimal assignment of flights to the gates of an airport, in order to minimize the passenger travel time.
• To study the problem, we adopt a qubit-efficient binary encoding with a cyclic mapping, which is suitable for a digital quantum computer.
• Using this encoding in conjunction with the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as an aggregation function, we systematically explore the performance of the approach by classically simulating the CVaR-VQE.