# Control of automated guided vehicles without collision by quantum annealer and digital devices

## TL;DR

This paper presents a novel optimization formulation for collision-free control of automated guided vehicles using quantum annealers and digital devices, demonstrating efficiency and speed advantages in real-world plant scenarios.

## Contribution

It introduces a quadratic cost function-based formulation for vehicle control that leverages quantum annealers and digital solvers, showing practical effectiveness in an actual plant environment.

## Key findings

- Quantum annealer D-Wave 2000Q provides rapid solutions for small vehicle sets.
- Digital computers efficiently solve large-scale vehicle control problems.
- The proposed formulation outperforms conventional methods in smooth, collision-free vehicle control.

## Abstract

We formulate an optimization problem to control a large number of automated guided vehicles in a plant without collision. The formulation consists of binary variables. A quadratic cost function over these variables enables us to utilize certain solvers on digital computers and recently developed purpose-specific hardware such as D-Wave 2000Q and the Fujitsu digital annealer. In the present study, we consider an actual plant in Japan, in which vehicles run, and assess efficiency of our formulation for optimizing the vehicles via several solvers. We confirm that our formulation can be a powerful approach for performing smooth control while avoiding collisions between vehicles, as compared to a conventional method. In addition, comparative experiments performed using several solvers reveal that D-Wave 2000Q can be useful as a rapid solver for generating a plan for controlling the vehicles in a short time although it deals only with a small number of vehicles, while a digital computer can rapidly solve the corresponding optimization problem even with a large number of binary variables.