Solving industrial fault diagnosis problems with quantum computers

In this article, we investigate in how far quantum computers can be leveraged to solve NP-complete fault diagnosis problems within the area of industrial cyber-physical systems. Therefore, two approaches are proposed which exploit quantum computing to solve diagnosis problems: The first method employs Grover’s algorithm, and the second is based on the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm. To show the industrial application, we present an integrated approach to learn the diagnosis model from process data, check whether the model is suitable, and use it for diagnosis. The result is a method for quantum industrial fault diagnosis. For this approach, the diagnostic capabilities and the runtime have been evaluated on an IBM Falcon processor using three publicly available benchmarks from the process industry. Further, the scaling between quantum computers and classical PCs has been analyzed.