Differentiable Quantum Architecture Search For Job Shop Scheduling Problem

Abstract: The Job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) plays a pivotal role in industrial applications, such as signal processing (SP) and steel manufacturing, involving sequencing machines and jobs to maximize scheduling efficiency. Before, JSSP was solved using manually defined circuits by variational quantum algorithm (VQA). Finding a good circuit architecture is task-specific and time-consuming. Differentiable quantum architecture search (DQAS) is a gradient-based framework that can automatically design circuits. However, DQAS is only tested on quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) and error mitigation tasks. Whether DQAS applies to JSSP based on a more flexible algorithm, such as variational quantum eigensolver (VQE), is still open for optimization problems. In this work, we redefine the operation pool and extend DQAS to a framework JSSP-DQAS by evaluating circuits to generate circuits for JSSP automatically. The experiments conclude that JSSP-DQAS can automatically find noise-resilient circuit architectures that perform much better than manually designed circuits. It helps to improve the efficiency of solving JSSP.