QOPTLib: a Quantum Computing Oriented Benchmark for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
This work addresses the need for a general-purpose benchmark in quantum computing for combinatorial optimization, though it is incremental as it builds on existing problems and methods.
The authors introduced QOPTLib, a benchmark of 40 instances across four combinatorial optimization problems, designed for quantum computing and hybrid approaches, and provided initial results using two quantum annealing solvers to set a baseline for future research.
In this paper, we propose a quantum computing oriented benchmark for combinatorial optimization. This benchmark, coined as QOPTLib, is composed of 40 instances equally distributed over four well-known problems: Traveling Salesman Problem, Vehicle Routing Problem, one-dimensional Bin Packing Problem and the Maximum Cut Problem. The sizes of the instances in QOPTLib not only correspond to computationally addressable sizes, but also to the maximum length approachable with non-zero likelihood of getting a good result. In this regard, it is important to highlight that hybrid approaches are also taken into consideration. Thus, this benchmark constitutes the first effort to provide users a general-purpose dataset. Also in this paper, we introduce a first full solving of QOPTLib using two solvers based on quantum annealing. Our main intention with this is to establish a preliminary baseline, hoping to inspire other researchers to beat these outcomes with newly proposed quantum-based algorithms.