Assessing the Requirements for Industry Relevant Quantum Computation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the technological requirements for industry-relevant quantum computing using resource estimation, revealing that current and near-term hardware faces significant challenges to achieve quantum advantage in industrial shift scheduling.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of quantum resource needs for industrial shift scheduling, highlighting the critical role of operation times and error rates for future quantum advantage.

Findings

Execution time of operations dominates runtime

Achieving quantum speedup requires error rates below 10^{-6}

Measurement operations must be under 10ns for advantage

Abstract

In this paper, we use open-source tools to perform quantum resource estimation to assess the requirements for industry-relevant quantum computation. Our analysis uses the problem of industrial shift scheduling in manufacturing and the Quantum Industrial Shift Scheduling algorithm. We base our figures of merit on current technology, as well as theoretical high-fidelity scenarios for superconducting qubit platforms. We find that the execution time of gate and measurement operations determines the overall computational runtime more strongly than the system error rates. Moreover, achieving a quantum speedup would not only require low system error rates ($10^{-6}$ or better), but also measurement operations with an execution time below 10ns. This rules out the possibility of near-term quantum advantage for this use case, and suggests that significant technological or algorithmic progress will be needed before such an advantage can be achieved.