Power network optimization: a quantum approach

Abstract: Optimization of electricity surplus is a crucial element for transmission power networks to reduce costs and efficiently use the available electricity across the network. In this paper we showed how to optimize such a network with quantum annealing. First, we define the QUBO problem for the partitioning of the network, and test the implementation on purely quantum and hybrid architectures. We then solve the problem on the D-Wave hybrid CQM and BQM solvers, as well as on classical solvers available on Azure Quantum cloud. Finally, we show that the hybrid approaches overperform the classical methods in terms of quality of the solution, as the value of the objective function of the quantum solutions is found to be always lower than with the classical approaches across a set of different problem size.