New collaboration with Lufthansa Industry Solutions

January 21, 2025

Flight operations must continuously adapt to meet rising demands for efficiency and sustainability. For airlines, operational profitability is no longer just about expanding routes or increasing fleet size; it hinges on maximizing resource utilization through strategic and tactic planning processes.

These tasks range from long-term strategies, such as designing optimal annual flight schedules, to highly dynamic short-term adjustments, including real-time route optimization and day-to-day crew management. The intricacy of these challenges, driven by countless variables and constraints, often pushes traditional methods to their limits, making it clear that innovative solutions are needed to stay competitive in an evolving industry. Quantum computing can tackle such complexity.

As part of the "QCI QCMobility" project, Lufthansa Industry Solutions has been awarded the contracts for the two sub-projects "Strategic Planning Processes" and "Tactical Planning Processes."

We are proud to announce that Lufthansa Industry Solutions is supported in this project by Kipu Quantum as a subcontractor.

In the project, our team aims to address three interconnected optimization problems fundamental to strategic flight operations planning:

  • Aircraft Rotation Optimizer
  • Tail Assignment
  • Short Term Planning

Together with LHIND, we will model these challenges using QUBO (Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization) and HUBO (Higher-Order Unconstrained Binary Optimization) formulations to implement solutions on quantum computers. These problems will be solved using highly efficient quantum algorithms and evaluated on both classical and quantum hardware. The evaluation will include benchmarking for scalability and applicability to real-world flight operations.

The data for this project will come directly from Eurowings’ operational planning systems, encompassing over 100 aircraft operating across 13 locations. This adds significant complexity to the optimization tasks and provides a rigorous testing ground for the solutions.

Our team at Kipu Quantum is excited to contribute our expertise in application- and hardware-specific quantum solutions. By adapting Kipu’s advanced algorithms to the aviation sector, we look forward to supporting the success of this groundbreaking project.
 
For more information, please read the press release here: https://www.presseportal.de/pm/128057/5953646
  
Do you want to learn more about DLR QCI QCMobility? Visit the website here: https://qci.dlr.de/en/lufthansa-industry-solutions-supports-qcmobility/