English

A practical applicable quantum-classical hybrid ant colony algorithm for the NISQ era

Quantum Physics 2024-10-24 v1 Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

Quantum ant colony optimization (QACO) has drew much attention since it combines the advantages of quantum computing and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm overcoming some limitations of the traditional ACO algorithm. However,due to the hardware resource limitations of currently available quantum computers, the practical application of the QACO is still not realized. In this paper, we developed a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm by combining the clustering algorithm with QACO algorithm.This extended QACO can handle large-scale optimization problems with currently available quantum computing resource. We have tested the effectiveness and performance of the extended QACO algorithm with the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) as benchmarks, and found the algorithm achieves better performance under multiple diverse datasets. In addition, we investigated the noise impact on the extended QACO and evaluated its operation possibility on current available noisy intermediate scale quantum(NISQ) devices. Our work shows that the combination of the clustering algorithm with QACO effectively improved its problem solving scale, which makes its practical application possible in current NISQ era of quantum computing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.17277,
  title  = {A practical applicable quantum-classical hybrid ant colony algorithm for the NISQ era},
  author = {Qian Qiu and Liang Zhang and Mohan Wu and Qichun Sun and Xiaogang Li and Da-Chuang Li and Hua Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.17277},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2403.00367

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:31:56.940Z