Albert Nieto-Morales

Arit Kumar Bishwas, Mousumi Sen, Albert Nieto-Morales et al.

As agentic artificial intelligence systems scale across globally distributed and long lived infrastructures, secure and policy compliant communication becomes a fundamental systems challenge. This challenge grows more serious in the quantum era, where the cryptographic assumptions built into today's AI deployments may not remain valid over their operational lifetime. Here, we introduce quantum secure by construction, or QSC, as a design paradigm that treats quantum secure communication as a core architectural property of agentic AI systems rather than an upgrade added later. We realize QSC through a runtime adaptive security model that combines post quantum cryptography, quantum random number generation, and quantum key distribution to secure interactions among autonomous agents operating across heterogeneous cloud, edge, and inter organizational environments. The approach is cryptographically pluggable and guided by policy, allowing the system to adjust its security posture according to infrastructure availability, regulatory constraints, and performance needs. QSC contributes a governance aware orchestration layer that selects and combines link specific cryptographic protections across the full agent lifecycle, including session bootstrap, inter agent coordination, tool invocation, and memory access. Through system level analysis and empirical evaluation, we examine the trade offs between classical and quantum secure mechanisms and show that QSC can reduce the operational complexity and cost of introducing quantum security into deployed agentic AI systems. These results position QSC as a foundational paradigm for post quantum agentic intelligence and establish a principled pathway for designing globally interoperable, resilient, and future ready intelligent systems.

Zhijie Tang, Albert Nieto-Morales, Arit Kumar Bishwas

Efficiently planning container loads onto trains is a computationally challenging combinatorial optimization problem, central to logistics and supply chain management. A primary source of this complexity arises from the need to model and reduce rehandle operations-unproductive crane moves required to access blocked containers. Conventional mathematical formulations address this by introducing explicit binary variables and a web of logical constraints for each potential rehandle, resulting in large-scale models that are difficult to solve. This paper presents a fundamental departure from this paradigm. We introduce an innovative and compact mathematical formulation for the Train Load Optimization (TLO) problem where the rehandle cost is calculated implicitly within the objective function. This novel approach helps prevent the need for dedicated rehandle variables and their associated constraints, leading to a dramatic reduction in model size. We provide a formal comparison against a conventional model to analytically demonstrate the significant reduction in the number of variables and constraints. The efficacy of our compact formulation is assessed through a simulated annealing metaheuristic, which finds high-quality loading plans for various problem instances. The results confirm that our model is not only more parsimonious but also practically effective, offering a scalable and powerful tool for modern rail logistics.

Jesús Lozano-Cruz, Albert Nieto-Morales, Oriol Balló-Gimbernat et al.

This study investigates the design choices of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) within quantum and hybrid convolutional neural network (HQNN and QCNN) architectures, applied to the task of satellite image classification using the EuroSAT dataset. We systematically evaluate the performance implications of data encoding techniques, variational ansätze, and measurement in approx. 500 distinct model configurations. Our analysis reveals a clear hierarchy of influence on model performance. For hybrid architectures, which were benchmarked against their direct classical equivalents (e.g. the same architecture with the PQCs removed), the data encoding strategy is the dominant factor, with validation accuracy varying over 30% for distinct embeddings. In contrast, the selection of variational ansätze and measurement basis had a comparatively marginal effect, with validation accuracy variations remaining below 5%. For purely quantum models, restricted to amplitude encoding, performance was most dependent on the measurement protocol and the data-to-amplitude mapping. The measurement strategy varied the validation accuracy by up to 30% and the encoding mapping by around 8 percentage points.