GNN-Guided Graph Coarsening and Adaptive QUBO Penalties for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows on a Quantum Annealer

📅 2026-09-03
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究使用图粗化和自适应QUBO惩罚方法,结合GNN指导合并节点,解决带时间窗的车辆路径问题,提高量子退火解的质量。
📝 Abstract
Graph coarsening reduces the large Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) formulations arising when vehicle-routing problems are solved by quantum annealing. Nearby customers with compatible time windows are merged into super-nodes, the reduced problem is solved, and the solution is expanded to the original graph. For the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (CVRPTW), existing coarsening heuristics require family-specific tuning and remain unreliable on random instances. We address these limitations on the Solomon benchmark using simulated annealing and a D-Wave Advantage2 processor. We first introduce adaptive penalty calibration. Uniform penalty scaling has little effect, whereas controlling the internal coefficient range substantially improves raw samples. Removing non-binding constraints, normalising binding ones, and scaling the remaining penalties reduces mean raw constraint violations from 33.0 to 0.06 at the same solver budget (p=3.7e-11, n=56). A variable-count-preserving control attributes this gain to conditioning rather than problem size. Second, we replace the hand-tuned merge score with a graph neural network (GNN) using one configuration across all families. At N=10, it achieves 100% feasibility across all Solomon families, including R-type (100% vs. 80% for the tuned heuristic). Across N=10,...,100, feasibility is 83% vs. 69%, with the GNN better or tied on 85/90 instance-size pairs. At N=80,100, the difference is significant (p=0.002; 25/25 pairs), while the QUBO remains approximately 5-6 times smaller. Finally, hardware experiments reproduce the conditioning effect at fixed logical variable count: feasible samples increase from 0.02% to 39% across 13 instances. Classical repair with local search remains a reference bound for end-to-end solution cost.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Graph Coarsening
CVRPTW
Quantum Annealing
Adaptive Penalties
GNN
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Adaptive Penalty Calibration
Graph Neural Network
Graph Coarsening
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Y
Youssef Kamel Rezk
Alamein International University, Alamein, Egypt
P
Paweł Gora
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland; Fundacja Quantum AI, Warsaw, Poland