Henry Quentir 11/3/26 Henry Quentir 11/3/26

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.

Université de Sherbrooke Plans Five Drone Surveillance Tours Over Quebec With Wildfire Risk Maps and a Neutral-Atom Quantum Heuristic, arXiv 2 October 2026: 31 Valid Plans on an Emulator, TRL 3

On October 2, 2026 four Université de Sherbrooke researchers posted a pipeline that turns machine-learned wildfire risk maps into daily routes for five surveillance drones over Quebec, with a neutral-atom quantum heuristic choosing which candidate tours can fly together. On Pasqal's EMU-SV emulator it returned a valid plan on all 31 days of July 2021 in 120 seconds each, where the HiGHS exact solver returned 10 in an hour per day. We read it as a dual-use mission-planning capability at TRL 3, set it against SuperQ's unquantified 1 October claim from the Bush Combat Development Complex, and note that hardware access after Pasqal's exit from Proqcima, a 1 hertz shot rate and unweighted encodings still stand between the paper and a program office.

Quantum Optimization Reports for Mission Planning Duty in Huntsville

At the 2026 Space and Missile Defense Symposium, defense engineering firm Davidson and computing company Strangeworks announced a proof of concept that will benchmark quantum optimization against the classical solvers that carry military mission planning today. The commitment to honest classical baselines is the part a program office should watch.