Onah, Hadfield and Michielsen Recover Optimal 10-City Tours on IBM's 127-Qubit ibm_brisbane With Hungarian Repair, arXiv 2611.00759, 31 October 2026: Quantum Routing for Mission Planning, TRL 3

Chinonso Onah, Stuart Hadfield and Kristel Michielsen posted arXiv 2611.00759 on 31 October 2026, a paper that treats classical feasibility repair as a third layer of a hybrid quantum optimizer and works out the distribution it produces. In simulation, Hungarian repair recovered the optimal 10-city tour with about 1,000 shots instead of 1,000,000; on IBM's 127-qubit ibm_brisbane, one-layer circuits with transferred parameters recovered the optimal tour on all seven QOPTLib instances up to 100 qubits. This post reads the result as dual-use quantum optimization capability in the optimization and logistics sub-branch, explains why it sits at TRL 3, sets the AFRL funding and the NASA QuAIL lineage beside the Volkswagen affiliation, and lists the classical baseline, the 30-city 900-qubit target and the verification a buyer of mission planning software should wait for before relying on feasibility repair on quantum hardware.