Multimodal Container Planning: A QUBO Formulation and Implementation on a Quantum Annealer

Quantum computing is developing fast. Real world applications are within reach in the coming years. One of the most promising areas is combinatorial optimisation, where the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimisation (QUBO) problem formulation is used to get good approximate solutions. Both the universal quantum computer as well as the quantum annealer can handle this kind of problems well. In this paper, we present an application on multimodal container planning. We show how to map this problem to a QUBO problem formulation and how the practical implementation can be done on the quantum annealer produced by D-Wave Systems.