When to Build Quantum Software?

TL;DR

This paper proposes an interactive advisor tool that helps businesses decide when to invest in quantum software by analyzing business context and quantum computational constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining business process modeling and natural language analysis to guide quantum software investment decisions.

Findings

Effective mapping of business context to quantum computational problems

A prototype of the decision-support advisor is developed

The approach aids in identifying suitable quantum development timing

Abstract

Despite ongoing advancements in quantum computing, businesses are still faced with the problem to decide if they would benefit from investing into this novel technology for building a business critical application. This uncertainty is not only owing to the limitations in the current state of the technology but also due to the gap between the level at which business applications are analyzed (e.g., using high level semi-formal languages) and the level at which quantum computing related information is currently available (e.g., formally specified computational problems, their algorithmic solutions with computational complexity theoretic analysis) to make informed decisions. To fill the discourse gap, in this paper, we present design of an interactive advisor, which augments users while deciding to invest into quantum software development as a plausible future option in their application context. Towards that we apply business process modeling and natural language similarity analysis using text-embeddings to associated business context with computational problems and formulate constraints in terms of quantum speedup and resource requirements to select software development platforms.