Simone Reale and Elisabetta Di Nitto from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering – Politecnico di Milano received the Best Paper Award for their paper ‘Quantum Graph Pursuit: Analysis of the Advantages and Challenges of a Quantum Dynamic Combinatorial Optimisation Model from a Software Developer Perspective’, presented at the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Software held from 7 to 13 July, 2024 in Shenzhen, China.
The paper experiments with quantum annealing and the D-Wave suite by developing a new application called Quantum Graph Pursuit, which is a dynamic combinatorial optimization problem. It delves into two models’ formulations and their implementation on the D-Wave system, relying both on the hybrid and fully quantum settings. The final objective of the work is twofold: to solve the initial problem, finding the right trade-off between expressiveness and complexity, and to obtain and share general indications on the formulation and implementation process themselves.