VINCI Energies and QuantumBasel Launch a Pilot Project with D-Wave’s Quantum Technology

QuantumBasel, Switzerland’s first quantum hub for commercial use embedded in the uptownBasel innovation campus, launches a quantum pilot project with VINCI Energies, an accelerator of environmental and digital transition. With D-Wave as its technology partner, QuantumBasel and VINCI Energies will work on the research and development of a series of quantum-hybrid applications. The collaboration will use D-Wave’s annealing quantum computers and quantum hybrid solvers through the Leap™ quantum cloud service to provide VINCI Energies with real-time access to quantum solutions

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“We believe today’s quantum-hybrid technologies can help solve these computationally complex problems to drive efficiencies and streamline building processes and look forward to working with VINCI Energies and uptownBasel to bring quantum to construction.”

VINCI Energies’ Use Case

One of the many challenges you face when constructing a building is the design of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. The design of the HVAC system involves several steps to maximize user comfort, minimize environmental burden and reduce cost of materials. One of the last steps in the HVAC design process is called “network generation” . This step ensures that all HVAC elements are correctly connected while complying with safety and sustainability requirements. While this step is of crucial importance it is also a step that is computationally very expensive or even prohibitive.

To tackle this computational bottleneck, VINCI Energies has developed a data-driven approach under their AI initiatives supported by VINCI’s Leonard innovation program. This approach dramatically reduces compute time and subsequent manual adjustments. However, the network generation problem falls into a category of combinatorial optimization problems that scale very badly on conventional devices such as CPUs or GPUs.

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Quantum computing approaches have the potential to solve certain combinatorial optimization problems more efficiently than purely conventional approaches. This is why VINCI Energies has started a collaboration with uptownBasel and D-Wave to investigate if / when / how they can further improve the quality (shorter compute time and lower costs) of the generated HVAC network solutions.

VINCI Energies’ quantum proof of concept – with a timeline of roughly six months – is divided into two phases: The problem formulation phase followed by the implementation and experimentation phase. During the current problem formulation phase, they have been translating the HVAC network generation problem – an essential part of the overall HVAC design process – into a well-defined form that D-Wave’s hybrid systems can understand. This has required several iterations between VINCI Energies’ HVAC subject matter experts and D-Wave’s quantum code developers to derive and investigate several representative model formulations. In addition, the team has prepared and adjusted multiple HVAC data sets and chosen tailored model evaluation and business metrics to later optimize and quantify the quality of the inferred HVAC network solutions.

VINCI Energies, uptownBasel and D-Wave have now reached a stage where they have two model formulations that are going to be used for experimentation during the early stages of the second phase.

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