Project Lead: Oxford Ionics
Sector: Transport/Logistics
Project Summary
This project addresses the challenge of standby crew allocation in airline operations, where airlines must position reserve crews to cover disruptions caused by unexpected crew unavailability. The problem is highly complex because of qualification constraints, aircraft-type requirements, operational rules, and the probabilistic nature of disruptions, leading to delays, cancellations, and significant costs across airline networks.
The project brings together Oxford Ionics, Classiq, and International Consolidated Airlines Group (IAG) to reformulate IAG’s existing graph-based optimisation model into quantum-native Potts/Ising and QUBO formulations. These will be solved using variational quantum algorithms such as QAOA, executed on the quantum emulator and real trapped-ion quantum hardware, including access to IonQ quantum processors.
Expected outcomes include demonstrating that realistic crew-allocation problems can run on near-term quantum computers, benchmarking quantum versus classical performance, identifying hardware requirements for operational-scale deployment, and establishing a roadmap toward quantum-enhanced optimisation for aviation and wider transport, logistics, healthcare, and emergency-service applications.
