QUACOD: Quantum Optimization via Coordinate Descent for Scalable Drone Scheduling

TL;DR

This paper introduces QUACOD, a quantum optimization method using coordinate descent to improve drone scheduling scalability and efficiency on limited quantum hardware.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel quantum optimization approach that decomposes complex problems, enabling scalable drone scheduling on NISQ-era quantum devices.

Findings

QUACOD outperforms existing quantum methods in drone completion times.

It handles up to 5 times more drones and 35 times more routes.

Hardware-efficient circuits are effective for quantum optimization.

Abstract

Quantum computing has demonstrated its potential to solve various optimization problems, including drone scheduling, which is important not only for drone delivery but also for logistics in general. However, one of the main obstacles is that practical drone scheduling settings typically require quantum resources that current hardware cannot provide. Therefore, in this work, we introduce a new Quantum Optimization via Coordinate Descent (QUACOD) approach to address this problem under the constraint of a limited number of available qubits. By leveraging coordinate descent, QUACOD decomposes the original high-complexity problem into multiple subproblems, which are then solved using quantum optimization. In our experiments, QUACOD outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) quantum-based drone scheduling method not only in optimized drone completion times but also in scalability, handling up to 5 times more drones and 35 times more routes. In addition, QUACOD demonstrates that hardware-efficient circuits are effective for optimization problems. Together, these contributions advance quantum computing toward practical applications in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era.