Quantum Optimization has already been demonstrated for routing, but in many settings, there is a need to efficiently allocate resources and perform actions accordingly. It should be therefore no surprise that industrialists around the globe are looking to Quantum to provide an efficiency edge. In a recent article, a generalization of the binary paint shop problem (BPSP) to tackle an automotive industry application, the multi-car paint shop (MCPS) problem is highlighted. The objective of the optimization is to minimize the number of colour switches between cars in a paint shop queue during manufacturing, a known NP-hard problem in mathematics.
In the paper: “Multi-car paint shop optimization with quantum annealing”, the multi-disciplined team from auto giant VW, study real-world data from an actual factory from Wolfsburg, Germany (the headquarters of VW and where they build many of their cars). The team compare the performance of the D-Wave 2000Q and Advantage quantum processors to other classical solvers and a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm offered by D-Wave Systems
Read the article here.
