Quantum in Manufacturing
Manufacturers today face many challenges to stay competitive and profitable: labor shortages, supply chain constraints and disruption, non-optimal inventory. To transform business challenges into advantages, manufacturers should incorporate new technologies that can deliver real benefits—including quantum computing—into their operations now.
Delivering Real Business Value Today
Our manufacturing customers have included organizations such as DENSO, Toyota, SavantX/Port of Los Angeles and Ford Otosan. They have identified complex business problems where quantum hybrid solutions can deliver an edge to help drive revenue, streamline operations, and reduce costs. Hear what Fort Otosan is doing.
Flow-shop Scheduling Optimization
Flow-shop scheduling (FSS) is an optimization challenge that involves organizing a set of jobs that need to be processed through multiple machines in a specific order. This type of scheduling is important in manufacturing and production environments where operators are pressed to efficiently manage the workflow by optimizing the time it takes to complete each job and thus maintain a smooth and linear progression through the production line.
D-Wave’s hybrid nonlinear-program solver (NL solver) improves this process to drive operational efficiencies. Read how D-Wave’s NL solver outperforms other solvers in this study.
Built for Optimization Across the Value Chain
D-Wave's technology is based on quantum annealing, which is best for combinatorial optimization problems with large numbers of variables and constraints. These types of problems make up a large part of the manufacturing problem space across every part of the value chain, such as materials procurement, robotics, plant maintenance, route optimization, pricing, staffing, scheduling, and more. Using D-Wave quantum technology, Volkswagen saw a significant improvement in efficiency for both route optimization and a car painting assembly line.
“We now have three different optimization algorithms that are working quickly enough so that when the unexpected happens, say, that’s a truck carrying some of our supply parts gets involved in an accident. We can get the part, get the vehicles that require those parts out of the list and regenerate the list quickly.”
— Ziya Dalkılıç, Data Scientist, Ford Otosan
Unlock Your New Competitive Edge
Forward-thinking manufacturers can secure a first-mover advantage by identifying relevant quantum use cases now and achieving quantum solutions faster. Future-proof your business and accelerate time-to-value with smarter decision-making, enhanced risk management, lower operational costs, and increased revenue.
Make Quantum Part of Your Digital Strategy Today
D-Wave offers a phased, consultative approach that guides manufacturing enterprises along their quantum journey to ensure demonstrable success and early proven ROI. Get started with quantum computing today by working with us on use case identification, problem exploration and formulation, and building real-world in-production quantum applications.
News & Resources
Ready to Launch Your Quantum Project?
D-Wave Launch™ is designed to help enterprises go from problem discovery to production implementation and accelerate the quantum journey. Engage our in-house professional services teams and technical domain experts to help kick off your first quantum project, train your teams on quantum, and realize real business value faster.
Problem Discovery
Identify your key quantum use cases, build a proof-of-concept plan, train up your end users
Quantum PoC
Build a working prototype or proof-of-concept using real application data, scope out production application roadmap
Production Pilot
Build, test, and deploy a production application using a phased approach
In Production
Deploy a live application at full production scale