Flight Gate Assignment with a Quantum Annealer

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Stollenwerk, Tobias, Lobe, Elisabeth, Jung, Martin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2018
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866916706112241664
author Stollenwerk, Tobias
Lobe, Elisabeth
Jung, Martin
author_facet Stollenwerk, Tobias
Lobe, Elisabeth
Jung, Martin
contents Optimal flight gate assignment is a highly relevant optimization problem from airport management. Among others, an important goal is the minimization of the total transit time of the passengers. The corresponding objective function is quadratic in the binary decision variables encoding the flight-to-gate assignment. Hence, it is a quadratic assignment problem being hard to solve in general. In this work we investigate the solvability of this problem with a D-Wave quantum annealer. These machines are optimizers for quadratic unconstrained optimization problems (QUBO). Therefore the flight gate assignment problem seems to be well suited for these machines. We use real world data from a mid-sized German airport as well as simulation based data to extract typical instances small enough to be amenable to the D-Wave machine. In order to mitigate precision problems, we employ bin packing on the passenger numbers to reduce the precision requirements of the extracted instances. We find that, for the instances we investigated, the bin packing has little effect on the solution quality. Hence, we were able to solve small problem instances extracted from real data with the D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1811_09465
institution arXiv
publishDate 2018
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Flight Gate Assignment with a Quantum Annealer
Stollenwerk, Tobias
Lobe, Elisabeth
Jung, Martin
Quantum Physics
Optimal flight gate assignment is a highly relevant optimization problem from airport management. Among others, an important goal is the minimization of the total transit time of the passengers. The corresponding objective function is quadratic in the binary decision variables encoding the flight-to-gate assignment. Hence, it is a quadratic assignment problem being hard to solve in general. In this work we investigate the solvability of this problem with a D-Wave quantum annealer. These machines are optimizers for quadratic unconstrained optimization problems (QUBO). Therefore the flight gate assignment problem seems to be well suited for these machines. We use real world data from a mid-sized German airport as well as simulation based data to extract typical instances small enough to be amenable to the D-Wave machine. In order to mitigate precision problems, we employ bin packing on the passenger numbers to reduce the precision requirements of the extracted instances. We find that, for the instances we investigated, the bin packing has little effect on the solution quality. Hence, we were able to solve small problem instances extracted from real data with the D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer.
title Flight Gate Assignment with a Quantum Annealer
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.09465