Investigating the Chinese postman problem on a quantum annealer

• DOI: 10.1007/s42484-020-00031-9
• Publication Date: 2021-01-08T01:14:43Z
• Authors: Ilaria Siloi; Virginia Carnevali; Bibek Pokharel; Marco Fornari; Rosa Di Felice
• Keywords: D-Wave; Quantum annealing; QUBO; Routing problems;; Quantum Physics; 0103 physical sciences; D-Wave, Quantum annealing, QUBO, routing problems; FOS: Physical sciences; Quantum Physics (quant-ph); 01 natural sciences

The recent availability of quantum annealers has fueled a new area of information technology where such devices are applied to address practically motivated and computationally difficult problems with hardware that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. D-Wave annealers are promising platforms to solve these problems in the form of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization. Here we provide a formulation of the Chinese postman problem that can be used as a tool for probing the local connectivity of graphs and networks. We treat the problem classically with a tabu algorithm and using a D-Wave device. We systematically analyze computational parameters associated with the specific hardware. Our results clarify how the interplay between the embedding due to limited connectivity of the Chimera graph, the definition of logical qubits, and the role of spin-reversal controls the probability of reaching the expected solution.