Fraunhofer IOSB-AST and Honda Research Institute Europe Develop Hybrid Quantum-Classical Framework to Optimize EV Charging and Trip Allocation

Researchers at Fraunhofer IOSB-AST and Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH have developed a quantum-classical hybrid framework for optimizing electric vehicle charging and trip allocation. The study addresses the joint scheduling problem of charging and trips. The research team introduced a logic-based "conflict cuts" method that requires close to zero auxiliary qubits. By employing a sparse recursive State-of-Charge formulation, the density of the constraint matrix is reduced by approximately a factor of T/3 (where T represents the length of the planning horizon). The team validated the approach end-to-end on a small-scale instance using IBM quantum hardware. The architecture optimizes solutions through iterative solving between a "master problem" and "subproblems," passing "cutting planes" between them. The "conflict cuts" reduce the number of qubits required for QUBO (Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization) encoding to near zero.