Solving workflow scheduling problems with QUBO modeling

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the workflow scheduling problem, a known NP-hard class of scheduling problems. We derive problem instances from an industrial use case and compare against several quantum, classical, and hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. We develop a novel QUBO to represent our scheduling problem and show how the QUBO complexity depends on the input problem. We derive and present a decomposition method for this specific application to mitigate this complexity and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.