Vision
We are developing a platform and ecosystem for Quantum-assisted Artificial Intelligence, PlanQK for short. Users will be able to access a quantum AppStore, developers will be able to use quantum platforms in a simple way and specialists will be able to provide concepts that make quantum computing easily accessible.
About PlanQK
Development of a Platform and Ecosystem for Quantum-assisted Artificial Intelligence.
PlanQK is supported by well-known companies, scientific institutions and association.

Become part of the PlanQK Community
Use Cases
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Scheduling and duty schedule optimization
In duty schedule optimization, personnel resources must be allocated to different tasks. An example would be the planning of the technical field service or the technical maintenance service. This use case should also take into account that tasks often arise at short notice. For example, a Quantum Boltzmann Machine can be used to train a neural network with data from older duty rosters and their short-term changes.
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Municipal registers AI
Automated linking of citizen information from so-called specialized processes that have been separated until today. The event of a change of address at the residents’ registration office should automatically lead to the offer of a new residents’ parking permit and the re-registration of waste disposal, without the systems communicating with each other via standardized interfaces. Thus a kind of recommendation system is created, which in turn can be solved as an optimization problem on quantum computers.
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Water anomaly detection in public buildings
Detection of pipe bursts and other faulty operating conditions via noises on the main water supply line. The early detection of pipe bursts, for example in sports halls and schools, is of great importance for administrations and insurance companies because of the potentially high damage amounts. A Quantum Support Vector Machine, for example, can be used here as an application in the area of predictive maintenance.
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Network Operation
In order to ensure a smooth operation of the core or access network, the load on all nodes and edges must be minimized. At the planning level, it is important to find a cost-minimizing expansion of the capacity matrix (i.e. minimum network expansion costs) for a given development of the network throughput in order to operate the future volumes in the network with minimum “maximum utilization”. For many related graph problems, formulations exist as optimization problems that can be solved or their solutions improved based on QAOA or Quantum Annealing.
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Industrial Production Lines
In a (sheet metal) production facility, it must be decided upon receipt of an order how parts are to be distributed on raw material sheets and when which of these raw material sheets are to be processed on which machine. Of course, the restrictions of the problems must be observed, e.g. a machine can only process one sheet at a time, the number of machines is given and an order must be completed within the scheduled time. This use case can be treated as a decision making problem using Quantum-enhanced Reinforcement Learning or as a linear equation system using HHL.
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Customer Behavior Prediction
Customer Churn Prediction” is the ability to recognize the probability of a contract change from the behavior of the customer. Here, model-driven AI approaches can be used, which learn a behavior model from customers and thus act similar to methods of predictive maintenance. Training an AI on concrete countermeasures (better offers, more direct contact, etc.) is promising here and could be supported by Quantum Reinforcement Learning, for example.
News about PlanQK
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The company ControlExpert is now an associated partner of PlanQK. As an expert in the field of automotive claims management, the goal is to find ways in which quantum-assisted artificial intelligence can support these activities.
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The PlanQK project (Platform and Ecosystem for Quantum-Assisted Artificial Intelligence) will receive a significantly higher funding volume from 2021 onwards and gains four additional consortium partners. As a result of these innovations, nearly 30 quantum applications from a wide range of industries will now be brought to the platform, for which additional components will also be developed.
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The British company Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) is a new associated partner of PlanQK. With its approach of an open platform, PlanQK intends to support the international exchange of specialists in the area of quantum-assisted artificial intelligence.
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In the “Quantum Landscape Outlook 2021”, PlanQK is listed as a lighthouse project of the German research and development landscape in the field of quantum computing. Particular emphasis is placed on the focus of the applicability of quantum computing. The Quantum Landscape Outlook 2021 is a summary of developments in 2020 to educate economic actors in particular about global trends.
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In addition to the recently published forecasts on quantum hardware development by IBM and Google, the company IonQ announced in early October that its quantum computer is the (currently) strongest in the world. This statement is based on IBM’s proposed metric of the so-called quantum volume, which takes into account factors such as error resistance and entanglement capacity in addition to the pure qubit number. While companies such as IBM and Honeywell announced a quantum volume of 64 for their computers in the course of this year (and IBM even announced one of 128 since the beginning of December), IonQ predicted a quantum volume of more than 4 million based on the parameters of their quantum computer architecture. This statement was reason enough for us to work out the differences between the qubit architectures in more detail.
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StoneOne and the University of Stuttgart presented the new project PlanQK (Platform and Ecosystem for Quantum-Assisted Artificial Intelligence) to a broad public for the first time at the Digital Summit in Dortmund on October 28 and 29. A physical quantum system from IBM attracted the interest of the visitors at the stand. IBM is an associated partner of PlanQK and contributes appropriate hardware.
Testimonials
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“A platform for the exchange on the subject of QKI “[…] would be a great thing! It is my wish to get to know more concrete use cases of QC and AI. What kind of effort is being made? Which skills are required? What do I have to do to create the conditions for QC and AI? What are these conditions? How do I finance them?”
Michael Zaddach, CIO, Airport Munich
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“Quantum computing and artificial intelligence are two highly relevant and highly complex technologies which, especially when combined, could hold unknown potential for Allianz. I would welcome an exchange on these subjects immensely.”
Ralf Schneider, CIO, Allianz SE
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“AI, QC and all that goes with it, cannot be done by anyone alone. This requires partners and networks that are working together. What matters most to us is the respective fields of competence that such a platform covers. We are rather less interested in “classical” consultants, but in consultants who act as implementation consultants, for example in the concrete implementation of solutions or in training.”
Dieter Rehfeld, Chairman of the Board, regio iT GmbH