Fairness evaluation during the conceptual design of heat grids with quantum annealers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a workflow for assessing thermal fairness in district heating network designs, utilizing quantum annealing to optimize load balancing and identify optimal producer configurations.

Contribution

It presents a novel workflow that incorporates quantum annealing for load balancing and fairness evaluation during the conceptual design of heat grids.

Findings

Quantum annealers can efficiently solve load balancing in heat grid design.

Optimal number of producers depends on the network topology.

Workflow demonstrates practical application of quantum computing in infrastructure planning.

Abstract

This paper presents a workflow to evaluate the macro scale thermal fairness for producers in a district heating network during the conceptual design phase of such a network. It uses the workflow to evaluate two types of proposed topologies for a future network to be constructed in Europe. The workflow is also novel in the sense that it has been demonstrated in the paper that within the implementation, the load balancing step can be solved readily by a quantum computing system (in particular, a quantum annealer from DWave). The concept of fairness is also addressed in the workflow and the results show that there exist an optimum number of producers for a given district heating topology.