We investigate the minimum edge multiway cut problem, a fundamental task in evaluating the resilience of telecommunication networks. This study benchmarks the problem across three quantum computing paradigms: quantum annealing on a D-Wave quantum processing unit, photonic variational quantum circuits simulated on Quandela s Perceval platform, and IBM s gate-based Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). We assess the comparative feasibility of these approaches for early-stage quantum optimization, highlighting trade-offs in circuit constraints, encoding overhead, and scalability. Our findings suggest that quantum annealing currently offers the most scalable performance for this class of problems, while photonic and gate-based approaches remain limited by hardware and simulation depth. These results provide actionable insights for designing quantum workflows targeting combinatorial optimization in telecom security and resilience analysis.
@article{arxiv.2601.00720,
title = {Quantum Approaches to the Minimum Edge Multiway Cut Problem},
author = {Ali Abbassi and Yann Dujardin and Eric Gourdin and Philippe Lacomme and Caroline Prodhon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.00720},
year = {2026}
}