A Quantum Computing Approach for the Unit Commitment Problem

Planning energy production is a challenging task due to its cost-sensitivity, fast-moving energy markets, uncertainties in demand, and technical constraints of power plants. Thus, more complex models of this so-called unit commitment problem (UCP) have to be solved more rapidly, a task that probably can be solved more efficiently via quantum computing. In this article, we model a UCP with minimum running and idle times as a quadratic unconstrained optimization problem to solve it on quantum computing hardware. First experiments confirm the advantages of our formulation in terms of qubit usage and connectivity and most importantly solution quality.