Hybrid Quantum Computing -- Tabu Search Algorithm for Partitioning Problems: preliminary study on the Traveling Salesman Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm combining quantum computing with Tabu Search to solve Traveling Salesman Problems, aiming to improve efficiency and resource utilization in early-stage quantum architectures.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid quantum-classical approach with resource control and reduction of non-profitable quantum accesses, tailored for complex optimization problems.

Findings

Promising results on TSP instances

Significant reduction in quantum resource access

Potential for improved partitioning problem solutions

Abstract

Quantum Computing is considered as the next frontier in computing, and it is attracting a lot of attention from the current scientific community. This kind of computation provides to researchers with a revolutionary paradigm for addressing complex optimization problems, offering a significant speed advantage and an efficient search ability. Anyway, Quantum Computing is still in an incipient stage of development. For this reason, present architectures show certain limitations, which have motivated the carrying out of this paper. In this paper, we introduce a novel solving scheme coined as hybrid Quantum Computing - Tabu Search Algorithm. Main pillars of operation of the proposed method are a greater control over the access to quantum resources, and a considerable reduction of non-profitable accesses. To assess the quality of our method, we have used 7 different Traveling Salesman Problem instances as benchmarking set. The obtained outcomes support the preliminary conclusion that our algorithm is an approach which offers promising results for solving partitioning problems while it drastically reduces the access to quantum computing resources. We also contribute to the field of Transfer Optimization by developing an evolutionary multiform multitasking algorithm as initialization method.