How quantum computing will transform the world of logistics

While logistics bosses may not be experts in computing and IT, most of us have to know our 1s from our 0s – or at least how to work with our IT department to make sure we’re doing the best job we can to get things to their destinations quickly.

With the pandemic, Brexit and the general supply chain issues facing the globe, logistics has never been more important, nor more under the public’s scrutiny. All of these problems mean that the last mile stretches ever longer before us, particularly with the massive rise in B2C / direct-to-consumer logistics. That means any improvement we can make should be considered, whether we fully understand it or not. And with tech research firm Ventana showing that 79% of companies still use spreadsheets for supply chain planning, it would seem that most of us are a bit slower on the technology uptake than we should be.

Welcome to the quantum age

The first thing any logistics manager or CEO of a logistics firm considers is optimisation – so much so, we probably mutter it in our sleep! There are many solutions and route options to the travelling salesperson problem, no matter how few stops they have. When constraints are added in, the optimisation question requires a mathematical algorithm to sift through tons of data, quickly, to come up with the optimum solution.

This is where quantum computing (QC) steps in. The ability to process data and take meaningful practical applications from the processed data is what sets the great apart from the good. Using QC, we can sort through huge data sets quickly, efficiently, and in a way that gives us real-world scenarios to improve on-time delivery rates.

Who’s doing it and how?

DHL is one of the companies investing in QC, both in research (the company has a dedicated hub for it on its website) and in practical application.

From DHL’s 2020 article on QC revolutionising logistics: “Tapping into the power of the technology, logistics providers can optimize supply chain processes with real-time dynamism that is not achievable by regular desktop computers or supercomputers.

Dynamic route optimisation, for instance, continues to be an issue troubling the industry where consumer expectations of speed and cost-effectiveness reign supreme. With QCmaking headway, however, this could soon improve.”

While Volkswagen and traffic management may only be tangentially linked to our industry, its QC pilot programme completed last year on bus routes is the talk of every town. Partnering with one of QC’s wunderkinds – Canadian-based D-Wave Systems – the German automotive giant chose nine buses delivering attendees to a conference in Lisbon, Portugal, to take part in the pilot.

Bus drivers were given an app that communicated constantly with a cloud-based quantum web service platform, which supplied bus drivers with the absolute optimal route, via constant assessment of traffic, weather and update data. D-Wave’s quantum computers had to solve 1,275 optimisation tasks to give the best routes. Interestingly, none of the buses ever took the same route, yet managed to never take longer than previous journeys, every time.

Volkswagen QC researcher Sheir Yarkoni said of the project: “We consider this to be the first real commercial application that depended on live access to a quantum processor.”

And, as many have pointed out, well before the first commercially viable quantum computers hit the market (as it were), QC will drastically change the way we live – some anticipate as early as 2025.

What about security?

Of course, the danger of adopting any technology that’s on the cusp is two-fold:

1. If you you’re not an early adopter, you could literally lose out on millions or
2. If you’re an early adopter who doesn’t mitigate for potential threats, you could lose out on millions

By now, you’ve probably read that not only can QCs help industry in many ways, but they can also harm us. Their ability to decrypt nearly all currently existing cryptographic techniques is legendary. So far, none of these invaluable machines have fallen into the hands of threat actors, but as soon as they do, we’re up the proverbial without a paddle.

Thankfully, there are a few companies, such as London’s Arqit Quantum, Inc., ID Quantique in Switzerland and InfiniQuant in Germany – all of which are determined to beat the quantum threat before it’s at your doorstep.

Probably the most interesting solution of all of those is Arqit’s QuantumCloud, which aims to be a cost-effective symmetric key platform-as-a-service created with the IoT world in mind. Using satellites to deliver keys, the company’s service stands out because it protects against literally all the major types of attacks most commonly used by cyber thieves, as well as against the quantum threat.

All in all, QCs are here, they’re going to change our world overnight and they’re something the logistics industry should adopt post-haste.