Manufacturing

Estimate ground-state energy of multi-constituent solid-state systems. Battery cathode chemistry, super-alloy design, semiconductor doping.

Vehicle routing where each route's load must respect a vehicle capacity. Beverage / bulk-goods distribution, port-to-store container moves.

Arrange large IP blocks (CPU cluster, GPU, SRAM, IO ring) on the die to minimise area + wirelength under aspect-ratio constraints. Earliest physical-design step in modern SoCs.

Select industrial / commercial loads to curtail or shift in response to a grid-operator signal, minimising cost while meeting the requested aggregate reduction.

Schedule jobs through a fixed sequence of processing stages on parallel machines (e.g. food / pharma packaging line, paint booth → curing → QC). Minimises makespan with stage-ordering constraints.

Place standard cells onto the silicon die so total wirelength is minimised. Inner loop of every digital-IC physical-design tool.

Joint route + delivery-timing decision: when to deliver to each customer over a planning horizon to keep inventories within bounds. Vendor-managed inventory, fuel / industrial-gas distribution.

Schedule a set of jobs across a set of machines to minimize total completion time. Semiconductor fab, automotive assembly, metal-fabrication line workload.

Compute generator dispatch and line flows that minimise system cost while respecting transmission limits under a single contingency. Real-time grid-operator workload (5-minute redispatch).

Route signal nets across PCB layers minimising crossings and via count. Encoded as a graph-partition QUBO solved via QAOA.

Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem — sequence project activities under precedence + shared-resource constraints. Construction, large-equipment manufacturing, software project mgmt.

Find shortest-cost routes for fleet vehicles or freight across multiple drop points. Logistics, last-mile, port-to-warehouse.

Decide which generators to bring online over the next 24-48 hours to meet forecast demand at minimum fuel cost subject to ramp + min-up constraints. Daily ISO / utility workload.

Vehicle routing where each stop must be visited inside a hard delivery / pickup time window. Last-mile, cold-chain, and home-appointment logistics.

Predict imminent equipment failure from rotating-machinery sensor features (vibration, temperature, current draw, acoustic). Reduces downtime in wind / steel / chemical plants.

Classify production-line camera tiles as defective vs. acceptable after CNN feature extraction. Semiconductor wafer, PCB, and automotive-paint inspection.