A Backend-Agnostic MWIS Kernel for Stochastic Unit Commitment with Neutral-Atom Hardware Validation
Abstract
Quantum hardware is beginning to address structured combinatorial optimisation, but two steps still block practical use: mapping real operational models onto hardware-compatible instances, and converting noisy hardware output back into feasible decisions. Here we introduce a backend-agnostic computational interface that compiles the discrete decision layer of stochastic unit commitment into a move-based maximum-weight independent set (MWIS) problem, while retaining continuous dispatch and feasibility recovery in the classical computational layer. We validate the approach in a green hydrogen scheduling setting and deploy it on the QuEra Aquila neutral-atom quantum processor. This is the first end-to-end industrial scheduling workflow that connects real operational decisions to programmable neutral-atom hardware through a solver-agnostic MWIS representation. Across a 15-day hardware campaign on 50-node instances, hardware-generated solutions after classical refinement match or exceed the dispatch margins obtained from exact MWIS on every day. When scaling to 144 nodes, encoding quality remains stable, while the probability that the full atom array survives, rather than graph embedding, emerges as the dominant bottleneck to further scaling. Together, these results establish a hardware-compatible computational pathway toward larger problem scales, and lay the groundwork for exploring regimes in which exact classical optimisation may no longer scale efficiently.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{chen2026backendagnostic,
title = {{A Backend-Agnostic MWIS Kernel for Stochastic Unit Commitment with Neutral-Atom Hardware Validation}},
author = {Jiying Chen and Min Lin and Jingwei Wen and Zhihong Zhang and Chuixiong Wu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.01248},
eprint = {2609.01248},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01248},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Backend-Agnostic MWIS Kernel for Stochastic Unit Commitment with Neutral-Atom Hardware Validation
AU - Jiying Chen
AU - Min Lin
AU - Jingwei Wen
AU - Zhihong Zhang
AU - Chuixiong Wu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.01248
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01248
AB - Quantum hardware is beginning to address structured combinatorial optimisation, but two steps still block practical use: mapping real operational models onto hardware-compatible instances, and converting noisy hardware output back into feasible decisions. Here we introduce a backend-agnostic computational interface that compiles the discrete decision layer of stochastic unit commitment into a move-based maximum-weight independent set (MWIS) problem, while retaining continuous dispatch and feasibility recovery in the classical computational layer. We validate the approach in a green hydrogen scheduling setting and deploy it on the QuEra Aquila neutral-atom quantum processor. This is the first end-to-end industrial scheduling workflow that connects real operational decisions to programmable neutral-atom hardware through a solver-agnostic MWIS representation. Across a 15-day hardware campaign on 50-node instances, hardware-generated solutions after classical refinement match or exceed the dispatch margins obtained from exact MWIS on every day. When scaling to 144 nodes, encoding quality remains stable, while the probability that the full atom array survives, rather than graph embedding, emerges as the dominant bottleneck to further scaling. Together, these results establish a hardware-compatible computational pathway toward larger problem scales, and lay the groundwork for exploring regimes in which exact classical optimisation may no longer scale efficiently.
ER -