On the Influence of a Quantum Annealer in a Hybrid Optimization Framework for Solving a High-Throughput Scheduling Problem

We consider a scheduling problem from an industrially relevant high-throughput laboratory, which we model as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem (QUBO). We are particularly interested in the impact of the D-Wave quantum annealer when solving this QUBO. Due to the limited capabilities of the D-Wave quantum hardware, we propose a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm to obtain a solution. For our study, we replace the quantum annealer in the hybrid algorithm by simulated annealing and compare the results. We find that the quantum annealer is not clearly superior to the simulated annealer, but can improve a local search with suitable perturbations.