Comparing Qubit and Qudit Encodings for EV Charging and Trip Assignment Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ekstrøm, Linus, Wang, Hao, Schmitt, Sebastian
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Ekstrøm, Linus
Wang, Hao
Schmitt, Sebastian
author_facet Ekstrøm, Linus
Wang, Hao
Schmitt, Sebastian
contents Variational quantum algorithms have attracted attention for their potential to solve combinatorial optimization problems. We study how the choice of encoding affects the resource requirements and optimization behavior of a variational quantum optimization algorithm. In order to quantify these effects, realistically inspired constrained electric vehicle (EV) fleet management problems were considered. These problems couple determining the optimal EV battery charging schedule with assigning EVs to trips requested by customers. We compare a conventional binary (qubit) trip encoding with an integer (qudit) encoding that represents assignments more directly. Both encodings guarantee the same feasible solution set, while the qudit encoding exponentially reduces the required Hilbert-space dimension. We solve many random instances of highly constrained uni- and bi-directional charging problems using qudit-based quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) and thoroughly evaluate the performance results. We find that the qudit encoding of customer trips achieves similar or better optimization performance at much reduced resource requirements and shorter simulation runtime. These results highlight qudit-native encodings as a practical route for integer and multi-valued scheduling problems in variational quantum optimization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Comparing Qubit and Qudit Encodings for EV Charging and Trip Assignment Problems
Ekstrøm, Linus
Wang, Hao
Schmitt, Sebastian
Quantum Physics
Variational quantum algorithms have attracted attention for their potential to solve combinatorial optimization problems. We study how the choice of encoding affects the resource requirements and optimization behavior of a variational quantum optimization algorithm. In order to quantify these effects, realistically inspired constrained electric vehicle (EV) fleet management problems were considered. These problems couple determining the optimal EV battery charging schedule with assigning EVs to trips requested by customers. We compare a conventional binary (qubit) trip encoding with an integer (qudit) encoding that represents assignments more directly. Both encodings guarantee the same feasible solution set, while the qudit encoding exponentially reduces the required Hilbert-space dimension. We solve many random instances of highly constrained uni- and bi-directional charging problems using qudit-based quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) and thoroughly evaluate the performance results. We find that the qudit encoding of customer trips achieves similar or better optimization performance at much reduced resource requirements and shorter simulation runtime. These results highlight qudit-native encodings as a practical route for integer and multi-valued scheduling problems in variational quantum optimization.
title Comparing Qubit and Qudit Encodings for EV Charging and Trip Assignment Problems
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10255