PSR will present the open source software ToQUBO, for optimizing power systems with quantum computing, at the “Workshop on Quantum Computing and Operations Research”, in Toronto, Canada.

ToQUBO was developed in collaboration with Dr. David Bernal of NASA’s Quantum Computing Laboratory. It automatically converts energy problems solved by conventional computers, such as transmission network planning and optimal AC power flow, into the QUBO (Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization) format, suitable for quantum computing. The data in QUBO format represents a quantum process of nature, the minimization of the energy of a set of atoms. This minimum energy is then calculated by specialized quantum computers known as “quantum annealers”. Finally, the resulting minimum energy atomic configuration is transformed back to the optimal decisions of the original optimization problem (e.g., investments in transmission lines). Because quantum annealers specialize in solving optimization problems, they are more advanced than more general quantum computers, and can already solve realistic problems. The figure shows the quantum annealer D-WAVE, purchased by NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Google, and other large companies. PSR and other quantum application developers use D-WAVE remotely through the company’s web services or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The ToQUBO software is on the PSR github page: https://github.com/psrenergy/ToQUBO.jl