Whether moving goods or farming land, civilizations have always sought to maximize resources, minimize costs, and improve efficiency — all practices that laid the foundation for optimization. In 1744, Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler mentioned that nothing in the world takes place without it. From there, the discipline of optimization evolved alongside advancements in computer science, culminating today with quantum computers for optimization purposes.
D-Wave has a 25-year history of developing annealing quantum computers and continues to demonstrate excellence in optimization. We’re making impressive progress on the scalability of our quantum solutions, with commercial-grade technology capable of supporting customers’ production needs. Driven by the desire to solve real-world problems more efficiently, we’ve worked closely with customers such as Pattison Food Group, Momentum Worldwide, and SavantX with the Port of Los Angeles. Together, we’ve found quantum’s sweetest spots — driving business efficiencies, increased revenues, and innovation with powerful quantum and hybrid quantum technologies.
Quantum Technology That Strikes at the Heart of Optimization Challenges
Quantum optimization aspires to meet some of our world’s biggest challenges at a time when it’s needed most. At our 10th annual Qubits conference in June, we introduced our new nonlinear-program hybrid solver. We believe it will enable our customers to real-world challenges and provide better performance at greater scale.
This new hybrid quantum solution effectively allocates business resources in competitive and challenging conditions. Alex Condello, D-Wave’s senior director of algorithms, performance, and tools, recently demonstrated the new hybrid solver’s capabilities. He showed how it optimizes emergency response planning and logistics, finding more efficient and sustainable routes in critical situations. He also described how the solver can account for complex constraints and adapt to changes — enabling faster, more coordinated action.
Watch the video. ⬇️
The nonlinear-program solver is purpose built for an advanced class of optimization problems, such as multivehicle routing and production scheduling. We believe it will propel our customers’ ability to address demanding tasks like these more effectively across a multitude of use cases, especially in supply chain logistics and manufacturing. These are two of the top areas for expected production-level use of quantum computing over the next 12 to 18 months, according to a June 2024 survey by Hyperion Research commissioned by D-Wave.
Read more about the new hybrid solver here. 📄
Quantum Meets the Real World
One powerful application for the new solver is logistics routing, which involves a fleet of vehicles operating together to achieve business objectives while navigating a variety of constraints. In these use cases, logistics operators are seeking to meet dynamic customer demand and balance workload among vehicles, while minimizing total distance and fuel consumption. Additional constraints may include vehicle capacity limits, time windows for pickups and deliveries, and driver work hours.
Workforce scheduling is another optimization problem at which quantum hybrid solvers excel. Many businesses and organizations need to consider the roster of their available workforce and the matrix of departments in which they work. Scheduling a workforce to meet forecasted demand must often consider both full and part-time workloads, seniority, multiple shifts, and weekends. A human-centered approach that can cater to team member preferences and holidays — while also adapting to sick days and short-notice leave requests — can create an organizational culture and workforce bond that can last for decades or generations.
Case Study: Pattison Food Group
The retail sector, especially grocery store operations, offers a prime example of quantum optimization’s real-world impact. Lindsay Dukowski, director of data and analytics at Pattison Food Group, has led the successful implementation of hybrid quantum applications to drive operational efficiencies in 58 stores. This century-old Canadian company faced complex challenges in workforce management across its 13 sub-brands, with 30,000 employees. The company supports different kinds of labor agreements, traditionally requiring schedulers to have 10 or more years of experience to navigate store-specific complexities. Therefore, workforce scheduling emerged as a particularly intricate and stressful problem. In 2020, Pattison Food Group collaborated with D-Wave’s professional services team to develop a quantum optimization solution. They created an approach that converts the diverse unionized worker agreements into mathematical constraints suitable for hybrid-quantum optimization techniques.
The quantum optimization approach yielded impressive results:
- Scheduling updates are now completed in minutes, reducing scheduling time by 80%.
- Weekly schedules were more consistent, within and across locations.
- Experienced schedulers were freed from back-office tasks to train team members and work closely with customers.
- The in-store scheduling application was easier for the company to build, having already successfully deployed their delivery driver scheduling application.
With quantum optimization yielding a myriad of benefits including more streamlined operations, Pattison Food Group is now running its workforce scheduling applications in production. It now plans to expand them across their banners, showcasing quantum optimization’s growing value in retail operations at enterprise scale.
Watch this video to hear how quantum optimization transformed retail workforce management at Pattison Food Group. ⬇️
In a quantum-optimized world, businesses can start solving what previously seemed intractable. With our new nonlinear program hybrid quantum solver, we believe better solutions can be found faster. Entire industries may start to see beyond previously insurmountable challenges, and this could lead to new ways of creating better customer experiences, greater employee satisfaction, and increased shareholder value while addressing sustainability goals too.
As businesses seek new technologies to meet these objectives, quantum optimization can provide the solution they need today. The efficiencies we’ve demonstrated with our quantum solutions coupled with our new solver’s boost in proficiency on problems of increased scale — could bring a more sustainable and people-friendly approach to staying competitive, efficient, and adaptable to changing market demands.
About D-Wave
D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services, and is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers. Our mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing today to benefit business and society. We do this by delivering customer value with practical quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, artificial intelligence, materials sciences, drug discovery, scheduling, cybersecurity, fault detection, and financial modeling.
Discover more at dwavequantum.com and begin your quantum journey today.
