Lufthansa Industry Solutions supports QCMobility

We issued a call for tenders to find support for our mobility project QCMobility in the sub-projects strategic and tactical planning processes. Lufthansa Industry Solutions has now been awarded the contract. The subcontractors are Deutsche Lufthansa, Eurowings and Kipu Quantum.

Air transport – like all mobility systems – is becoming more complex and must also become increasingly efficient. For airlines, this means that their economic success is also dependent on the efficient use of resources and therefore the best possible planning processes. In the long term, for example, when creating annual flight schedules and in the short term when adapting flight routes or day-to-day crew planning. Such planning problems are notoriously difficult and can no longer be solved optimally with many variables and constraints.

Quantum computing opens up new approaches to overcoming such complexity hurdles. Our mobility project QCMobility is researching and developing such approaches together with industrial partners and start-ups. One sub-area is tactical and strategic planning processes in air transport. To this end, we were looking for companies that, together with our research team from the DLR Institute of Air Transport and the DLR Institute of Quantum Technologies, would support the development and evaluation of the quantum optimisation of such planning processes using real use cases and realistic data sets.

QCMobility

Quantum computers for mobility applications

Applications Optimization

Lufthansa Industry Solutions impressed us with its highly interesting offer and was awarded both contracts. The company is supported by the subcontractors Deutsche Lufthansa, Eurowings and the quantum algorithm start-up Kipu Quantum.

Real data, real qubits, real benefits

One question that concerns us in QCMobility is which optimisation problems exist in the various mobility sectors and which quantum algorithms can contribute to better practical solutions. In the case of QCMobility | Tactical and Strategic Planning Processes in Air Transport, thanks to Lufthansa Industry Solutions, we can now benchmark various optimisation algorithms using real data from air transport, specifically Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) and Grover Adaptive Search (GAS) with data from the live systems and data warehouses of Deutsche Lufthansa for the tactical planning processes and QAOA, DCQO and hybrid DCQO from the live systems and data warehouses of Eurowings. By carefully selecting the data and boundary conditions, the project team can adjust the problem size to the performance of the quantum computers actually available to us. This enables realistic tests on real quantum computers and a meaningful comparison with classical algorithms.

With this close collaboration between research, industry and start-ups, we are rapidly transferring research findings into industrial applications, thus enabling a strong, competitive quantum computing ecosystem and innovative, sustainable mobility.