Status
The solution has been demonstrated to various stakeholders, showing its value. The prototype is ready to advance to a production phase.
FLAGSHIP PROGRAMME
Post-disaster inspector scheduling
Summary
Aim: To assess the feasibility and benefits of applying quantum computation technologies to optimise post-disaster property inspection schedules, while accounting for real-world operational constraints and problem scale.
The problem
In the aftermath of disasters (such as earthquakes), insurers are required to conduct inspections of buildings to assess claims. This normally involves large numbers of inspections to be performed by tens of inspectors as quickly as possible within a few days.
Typically, inspections must happen within time windows agreed with customers. Inspectors have different skill sets, and properties vary in inspection complexity. Additionally, inspectors may not start from the same location, nor are they always available.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) include reducing total travel time across all inspection jobs, and reducing the number of inspectors required to perform all jobs while maintaining an overall rapid response.
Solution
Multiple algorithms have been implemented (both classical and hybrid) and evaluated against historical data. A significant amount of the exploration has been dedicated to analysing the most efficient way to partition the optimisation problem between classical and quantum computation, taking advantage of the potential of both types of hardware. The most promising solution leverages the time-slot constraints as a way to reduce the problem into a concatenated list of subproblems, making their dimensionality suitable for current quantum hardware.
On our key KPI, the optimised schedule provides a minimum 5% reduction in required working hours, and an average reduction of 30%. The quantum-classical hybrid and the state-of-the-art classical solver achieved comparable performance. We expect they are both finding the optimal solution. This solution clearly delivers business value while being quantum-ready.