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Benchmarking the DC-OPF Problem on Quantum Annealers

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Màster Oficial de Ciència i Tecnologia Quàntiques / Quantum Science and Technology, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2025-2026. Tutors: Jordi Riu, Josep Bosch

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Combinatorial optimization problems can be naturally formulated as Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) models and subsequently mapped onto
Ising Hamiltonians, making them suitable for Quantum Annealing (QA) techniques.
However, the practical implementation of these approaches is hindered by the limited connectivity of current quantum hardware and by the difficulty of accurately
simulating the annealing dynamics for large-scale instances. In this work, a Direct Current Optimal Power Flow (DC-OPF) problem is formulated as a QUBO model
and studied from both the embedding and annealing perspectives. Two embedding strategies, namely minorminer and the Triangular Architecture, are analyzed in terms
of their physical qubit requirements. In addition, two simulation approaches, QiliSim and a variational method, are employed to investigate the annealing dynamics. To
improve the annealing performance, catalyst terms previously developed for systems without local fields are extended to account for the local field contributions naturally
present in the DC-OPF formulation. These additional interactions, inspired by diagonal augmentations of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA),
act as catalysts by enhancing the ground state fidelity with respect to standard quantum annealing. Different catalyst configurations are studied and their effect on the
probability of obtaining low energy states is analyzed. Furthermore, qubit reduction strategies based on thresholding and spectral decomposition are investigated in order
to decrease the physical resources required for implementation. The results show that the inclusion of local field contributions in the catalyst term, leads to a significant
improvement in the annealing performance and that suitable thresholding techniques allow the number of physical qubits to be reduced by approximately a factor of two
while preserving the quality of the obtained solutions. These findings provide further support for the catalyst framework and contribute to bringing realistic optimization
problems closer to current quantum hardware

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Màster Oficial - Ciència i Tecnologia Quàntiques / Quantum Science and Technology

# metadata.dc.title[].value
Benchmarking the DC-OPF Problem on Quantum Annealers