Automatic Conversion of MiniZinc Programs to QUBO
This addresses the tedious and time-consuming task for researchers and practitioners in quantum computing who need to prepare problems for quantum annealers like DWave.
The paper tackled the problem of manually converting optimization problems into Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) models for quantum computing by developing an automatic converter from MiniZinc to QUBO, which processes a large set of constraint problems and optimizes the conversion process.
Obtaining Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimisation models for various optimisation problems, in order to solve those on physical quantum computers (such as the the DWave annealers) is nowadays a lengthy and tedious process that requires one to remodel all problem variables as binary variables and squeeze the target function and the constraints into a single quadratic polynomial into these new variables. We report here on the basis of our automatic converter from MiniZinc to QUBO, which is able to process a large set of constraint optimisation and constraint satisfaction problems and turn them into equivalent QUBOs, effectively optimising the whole process.