Project from the ETH Quantum Hackathon 2024 in Zürich, attended during my BSc exchange semester at ETH. I put together a team with a few new-found friends from Politecnico di Milano - quantum technology and physics students who were in town for the hackathon.
We tackled the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem on the classic CMT benchmark dataset, splitting it into a clustering phase (assign customers to vehicles) and a routing phase (solve each per-vehicle TSP). The TSPs were encoded as QUBO instances and reduced to MaxCut to run on the quantum hardware available at the hackathon, with graph-separator tricks to keep the problems within the qubit budget.
Best part of the weekend was the people - still in touch with the PoliMi crew today. The hackathon also included a tour of the ETH quantum labs, where I finally got to physically touch a quantum computer. One off the bucket list. Nice.
