Quantum Computing Methods for Supply Chain Management
This work addresses inventory control problems in supply chain management for industry operations, but it is incremental as it applies quantum computing to an underexplored domain without broad SOTA impact.
The paper tackled the computational challenges in supply chain management by developing a quantized policy iteration algorithm for inventory control, demonstrating its effectiveness through simulations using IBM Qiskit and qBraid.
Quantum computing is expected to have transformative influences on many domains, but its practical deployments on industry problems are underexplored. We focus on applying quantum computing to operations management problems in industry, and in particular, supply chain management. Many problems in supply chain management involve large state and action spaces and pose computational challenges on classic computers. We develop a quantized policy iteration algorithm to solve an inventory control problem and demonstrative its effectiveness. We also discuss in-depth the hardware requirements and potential challenges on implementing this quantum algorithm in the near term. Our simulations and experiments are powered by \texttt{IBM Qiskit} and the \texttt{qBraid} system.