Water pressure scheduling, district heating dispatch, waste collection routing, and bus timetable synchronisation are all combinatorial optimisation problems. This workshop formulates each as QUBO and benchmarks quantum and quantum-inspired solvers against classical alternatives.
For city utility managers and smart city operations teams. Covers QUBO formulations for water distribution scheduling, district heating dispatch, waste collection routing (CVRP), and multi-modal transport timetabling. Includes quantum annealing and quantum-inspired solver benchmarks against OR-Tools and Gurobi.
City-scale resource management involves scheduling decisions across thousands of interdependent variables. A water distribution network with 200 pressure zones, 50 pump stations, and time-varying demand generates combinatorial scheduling problems that classical solvers handle but do not optimise globally. District heating dispatch across 30 substations with CHP units, thermal storage, and weather-dependent load profiles adds stochastic complexity. Waste collection for a city of 500,000 residents involves capacitated vehicle routing with time windows, multi-compartment vehicles, and depot assignment. Multi-modal transport timetabling requires synchronising bus, tram, metro, and bike-share schedules at interchange nodes to minimise passenger transfer times. Each of these maps naturally to QUBO formulations where constraints become penalty terms and objectives become quadratic cost functions over binary decision variables. This workshop formulates all four problem classes, solves them on quantum annealers (D-Wave Advantage) and quantum-inspired classical hardware (Fujitsu Digital Annealer), and runs benchmark-specific performance comparisons against OR-Tools and Gurobi. Current quantum annealer connectivity limits fully connected problems to 150-200 variables, so quantum-inspired solvers handling 100,000+ variables are the practical choice today. The workshop maps the fault-tolerant timeline (2028-2032) for production-scale municipal optimisation.
Full Day Workshop structure with scheduled breaks. Content is configurable to your organisation's technical level and operational environment.
| # | Session | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | City Resource Management as Combinatorial Optimisation Why water, energy, waste, and transport scheduling are quantum-amenable problems | |
| 2 | QUBO Formulations for Municipal Operations Encoding city utility problems for quantum and quantum-inspired solvers |
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| Break, after 50 min | ||
| 3 | Multi-Modal Transport Network Optimisation Bus, tram, metro, and bike-share scheduling as a unified optimisation problem |
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| 4 | Interactive Demonstration QUBO formulation and quantum-inspired solver for a city utility problem |
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| Break, after 45 min | ||
| 5 | NISQ Constraints and Quantum-Inspired Alternatives What works today versus the fault-tolerant horizon |
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| 6 | Q&A and Implementation Planning | |
Workshops are designed and delivered by QSECDEF in collaboration with sector specialists. All facilitators have direct experience in both quantum technologies and smart city systems.
Workshop design and delivery
QSECDEF brings world-leading expertise in post-quantum cryptography, quantum computing strategy, and defence-grade security assessment. Our advisory membership spans 600+ organisations and 1,200+ professionals working at the intersection of quantum technologies and critical infrastructure security.
Domain expertise and operational validation
Smart City workshops are co-delivered with sector specialists who bring direct operational experience in smart city organisations. This ensures workshop content is grounded in regulatory, operational, and technical realities specific to the sector.
Sessions are configured around your organisation's technical level, operational environment, and regulatory jurisdiction. Get in touch to discuss requirements and schedule a date.
Contact UsQuantum technologies are evolving quickly and new developments emerge regularly. This page was last updated on 15/03/2026. For the most current information about course content and suitability for your organisation, we recommend contacting us directly.
