QC Optimisation for Maritime Logistics - Case Studies

During the last decades Fraunhofer CML , had the chance to collect many insights from the maritime industry. It can be said that, currently many of their crucial business processes e.g. route and network planning, crew scheduling, cargo loading, yard management, berth and crane scheduling etc. are tackled in an experience-based and mostly manual way. Due to the complexity of these problems and their relevance for operations there is an increased need for decision support systems that can deliver good solutions very fast. Quantum computing is expected to provide advantages in optimization, both in terms of quality and speed of searching huge solutions spaces, which are characteristic for optimization problems arising in logistics.

By reducing computation time quantum computers will enable real time calculations of complex problems with conflicting objectives and increase the resilience and efficiency in logistics. Therefore, it is important to investigate the opportunities of this emerging technology for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Many works in operation research present mathematical models and solutions algorithms for combinatorial problem in maritime logistics like network planning in liner shipping, maritime inventory routing, berth allocation and quay crane optimization. But only a few of them address real-world use cases and present hybrid (combination of exact solution and heuristics) or pure-heuristics methods to solve them.

In our presentation we will present use cases together with industrial partners that are relevant in the field of maritime logistics and will look into state-of-the-art methods beyond QUBOs.