Performance Analysis: Vehicle Routing using Quantum Annealing

Vehicle routing refers to the generic problem of finding the optimal routes for a given fleet of vehicles with respect to a given measure of optimality and subject to a given set of constraints. Finding the exact solution to such a problem is NPhard. Hence, we often use heuristics to find feasible solutions. We use the DWave Hybrid solver to find a solution to the vehicle routing problem, and compare the time complexity of finding the solution as well as the quality of the solution found against a classical alternative, namely Gurobi v9.5. We observe that the quantum annealer shows better scaling with respect to size when compared to Gurobi.