From Cables to Qubits: A Decomposed Variational Quantum Optimization Pipeline

Quantum Physics arXiv:2510.21901 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 24 Oct 2025] Title:From Cables to Qubits: A Decomposed Variational Quantum Optimization Pipeline Authors:Paul-Niklas Ken Kandora, Adrian Asmund Fessler, Robert Fabian Lindermann, Phil Arnold, Andreas Hempel, Steffen Rebennack View a PDF of the paper titled From Cables to Qubits: A Decomposed Variational Quantum Optimization Pipeline, by Paul-Niklas Ken Kandora and 4 other authors View PDF Abstract:The Cable Routing Optimization Problem (CROP) is a multi-flow routing task central to industrial layouts and smart manufacturing installations. We formulate CROP as a cable-wise separable, block-diagonal Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization Problem (QUBO) and derive conservative penalty bounds that preserve feasibility. Exploiting this structure, we introduce a decomposition pipeline that builds one QUBO per cable, transforms each QUBO into a Hamiltonian and solves the subproblems with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). Finally, the solutions per cable are merged into a global routing assignment. This procedure reduces the per-run qubits from the full problem size to those of a single-cable subproblem. We test our performance on different cable routing optimization problems varying in size using Qiskit's SamplingVQE. Our findings indicate that a decomposed VQE approach attains feasible and optimal layouts across a range of cable-routing problems. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2510.21901 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2510.21901v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.21901 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Paul-Niklas Kandora [view email] [v1] Fri, 24 Oct 2025 15:02:27 UTC (23 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled From Cables to Qubits: A Decomposed Variational Quantum Optimization Pipeline, by Paul-Niklas Ken Kandora and 4 other authorsView PDFTeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2025-10 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)