Quantum Computing Takes Aim at Israel's Natural Gas Grid Optimization

Israeli quantum computing company Classiq and Israel Natural Gas Lines (INGL) have collaborated on a project to optimize natural gas transmission planning using quantum optimization. The challenge is to balance supply and customer demand while staying within constraints involving pressure, flow direction, and gas balance.

The team developed a hybrid quantum-classical workflow that searched for pressure configurations, taking into account supplier pressure, pipeline characteristics, and minimum pressure requirements for customers. In simulations involving a representative gas network, the system identified a valid configuration that maximized throughput and matched classical reference solutions.

The researchers then took the experiment further by running a reduced version of the optimization problem on IonQ's Forte-1 trapped-ion quantum processor. The quantum hardware produced physically valid candidate operating points that were close to the classical optimum.