Quantum computing use cases in transport

Where quantum technology could apply in transport

The report for the UK Department for Transport sorts transport applications by technology: quantum computing for optimization and scheduling, quantum sensing, timing and imaging, and quantum communications and security. Resonance, the network TQI belongs to, prepared the report, and the report states that its findings are the authors’ and not necessarily the Department’s views. Public evidence differs a lot between the three.

Road traffic and public transport: one small live pilot, then projects with no results

During Web Summit in Lisbon, November 4 to 7, 2019, Volkswagen guided nine Carris buses on three lines with a quantum optimization service that called a D-Wave processor. The authors of the Quantum Shuttle paper describe it as the first public application to rely on live access to a quantum processor. They report 162 valid trips and 1,275 optimization problems solved at an average response time of 4.69 seconds. The largest problem had 12 variables, with five buses routed at once. The authors conclude that the system avoided existing congestion, and the paper reports no comparison of travel times with a classical routing method.

Later road projects have not reported results. The German Aerospace Center runs QI-TraSiCo from September 1, 2023 to December 31, 2026, coupling signals at a real test field to a quantum-inspired backend. Quantum-inspired methods run on classical computers, as the Department for Transport report notes, and the project page lists no measured outcomes. In October 2025 Ayalon Highways, Israel’s largest transportation and traffic management organization, and Quantum Art announced a partnership on near real-time signal control across hundreds of intersections, to be benchmarked against classical simulation and optimization tools. The release gives no results or timeline.

Rail timetabling: two studies on real timetable data

On June 18, 2025 Q-CTRL announced a study with Network Rail and the Department for Transport, funded through the UK’s SBRI Quantum Catalyst Fund, using real arrival and departure times at London Bridge station. It routed 26 trains over 18 minutes on IBM hardware, a six-fold increase in solvable problem size compared with the same hardware without Q-CTRL’s software. The release compares with other quantum runs and reports no comparison with classical timetabling software. It quotes a Q-CTRL engineer expecting the solver to outperform classical approaches as early as 2028. That date is an expectation, not a result.

On July 20, 2026 IQM published results of a collaboration with Deutsche Bahn on a schedule of 190 trips across five German cities, which translates into roughly 98,500 possible cycles. A hybrid algorithm used the quantum approximate optimization algorithm on smaller subproblems inside a classical framework that handled the full problem, and the whole pipeline ran on IQM hardware. The release reports feasible, good-quality schedules and a statistically significant link between the subproblem size the quantum part could handle and solution quality. It reports no comparison with classical scheduling software, and it says the work covered planning under stable conditions, not disruption response.

Air transport: gate assignment, cargo loading and a result where classical solvers won

In June 2024 the University of Hamburg and Lufthansa Industry Solutions announced a three-year project on a quantum algorithm for airport gate assignment. The release reports no results and says the partners’ existing classical solution is already available to airports.

Aircraft cargo loading has been tested more closely. A Unisys, NQCC and Newcastle University team applied forward and reverse annealing to the problem and compared it with classical solvers. Their abstract at the APS Global Physics Summit on March 19, 2025 reports that the classical solvers, Pyomo and a greedy heuristic, returned better solutions and ran faster than the quantum annealers. A Physics World feature sponsored by the NQCC (April 16, 2025) describes the same team improving solution precision by combining quantum annealing with high-performance computing. A separate NQCC project led by 4colors with Airbus, ORCA Computing and DNV tested hybrid algorithms on gate-based and photonic hardware and benchmarked them against classical baselines. The project page states no results.

The German Aerospace Center’s QCMobility project is building a roadmap of optimization problems across air, road, rail, maritime and intermodal transport. A January 2025 update says the next two years will test NISQ and early fault-tolerant algorithms, first in simulation and then on real quantum computers with industrial partners.

Ports and shipping: a research project and no results

In Hamburg the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and Services runs QSH, a project supporting the city in assessing quantum computing for shipping and maritime logistics. It formalizes maritime optimization problems, develops classical, hybrid and quantum algorithms, benchmarks them and builds demonstrators, including tools for assigning ships to berths and for maritime inventory routing. The project page reports no performance results.

Navigation without satellite signals: flight tests by two vendors

On May 9, 2024 a flight at MoD Boscombe Down carried the Tiqker optical atomic clock and a cold-atom system, meant to be part of a quantum inertial navigation system, on QinetiQ’s RJ100 demonstrator aircraft. Infleqtion led the project with BAE Systems and QinetiQ, and the government put in nearly £8 million. The government release calls the flights a milestone toward the national mission to deploy quantum navigation systems on aircraft by 2030. It states that the systems cannot be jammed or spoofed and gives no accuracy figures.

On July 16, 2025 SandboxAQ and Acubed, Airbus’s Silicon Valley innovation center, published results of a campaign of more than 150 flight hours on a Beechcraft Baron 58, using a public magnetic anomaly map and routes between about 200 airports across the continental United States. The post reports that the magnetic navigation system stayed within 550 meters for 64 percent of flight time, within 1,852 meters for 95 percent and within 3,704 meters for 100 percent, and says it outperformed inertial navigation without satellite signals. It also says flight data was collected, reprocessed and streamed in real time to represent live operation, so the figures are not from a fully live system. Military quantum navigation programs, such as the US Defense Innovation Unit’s, are covered in the defense guide.

Underground and trackside sensing: one field test, a long way to a product

In February 2022 researchers at the University of Birmingham reported in Nature a quantum gravity gradient sensor that detected a 2 meter tunnel outdoors, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 8 across an 8.5 meter survey line at 0.5 meter spacing. The fitted depth of the tunnel center was 1.89 meters, with a range from about 1.3 to about 4.2 meters. The authors list reducing the risk of unforeseen ground conditions in energy, transport and utilities construction among the uses. The paper reports one tunnel at one site. The Department for Transport report values buried-asset detection by assuming a 10 percent gain in effectiveness, which is an assumption and not a measured result.

Secure communications and encryption: an announcement and deadlines

In October 2022 the Port of Rotterdam announced a quantum network with Q*Bird for port communications: a central hub, with users sharing keys generated by quantum key distribution and using them with conventional encryption. The announcement is written in the future tense, names Portbase and two or three other maritime logistics companies as first users, and gives no completion date or confirmation that the network is live.

Deadlines are firmer than deployments. The UK National Cyber Security Centre asks large organizations and operators of critical national infrastructure to set migration goals by 2028, carry out the highest-priority migration activities by 2031 and complete migration by 2035. The European Commission says that critical infrastructure should move to post-quantum cryptography no later than the end of 2030. The NCSC also will not support quantum key distribution for government or military use and recommends post-quantum cryptography as the primary defense, so a quantum key network is not a substitute for migration.

What the value estimates say, and what they do not

The Department for Transport report estimates a net value creation of at least £4 billion to £8 billion for UK transport by 2030 to 2035. The range comes from a minimum value creation estimate of about £7 billion, an additional cost of about £1 billion, and the explicit assumption that the figures only scratch the surface. The report calls it highly illustrative and says that impacts quantified in other research are yet to be proven at commercial scale. Its largest line, about £2.8 billion, rests on UK congestion costs of £6.9 billion a year and a Fujitsu simulation that suggested travel times might fall by 40 percent. Several lines scale a global estimate by the UK’s share of GDP. The report’s expert interviews put useful fault-tolerant quantum computers from about 2035 onward, and sensors such as magnetometers and gravimeters at scale within five years of its April 2024 information date.

The McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor, April 2026, estimates that quantum computing could be worth $200 billion to $500 billion by 2035 across travel, transport and logistics, excluding “black swan” breakthroughs. For passenger transport it shows $28 billion to $55 billion, or 2.5 to 5 percent of $1,103 billion of global costs in air, rail and bus passenger transport, as savings against today’s situation. The Monitor says each implementation depends on factors unique to the company, and its table of impact levers covers quantum computing and AI together. The Monitor describes the 2026 trend as scaling pilots for routing, scheduling and supply chain optimization to operational tests.

How to read a quantum transport claim

1. What is the baseline? The rail studies report no comparison with the timetabling software operators use today, and the Lisbon pilot reports no comparison with a classical routing method.
2. Is it a best case? “Within 1,852 meters for 95 percent of flight time” still leaves 5 percent outside it.
3. Is it quantum or quantum-inspired? QI-TraSiCo runs on classical computers.
4. How big was the problem? The Lisbon pilot solved up to 12 variables, the London Bridge study routed 26 trains for 18 minutes, and the Deutsche Bahn study solved subproblems inside a classical framework.
5. Who ran and wrote the test? The rail and navigation results come from the vendors. The Nature paper is peer reviewed and the vendor write-ups are not.
6. Pilot, test or operation? Every example here is a pilot, a test or an announcement, and the one study that compared quantum annealers with classical solvers found the classical solvers better.

What a transport organization can do now

• Build a cryptographic inventory and plan a phased migration against the 2028, 2031 and 2035 steps from the NCSC and the 2030 date for critical infrastructure in the EU.
• List the systems that depend on satellite positioning and timing, and what happens to each in an outage. The Department for Transport report estimates a satellite navigation outage would cost UK transport about £700 million a day, excluding food and beverage and emergency services.
• Rank scheduling, routing and loading problems by size and by whether a better classical method is cheaper, and ask any vendor for the baseline, the problem size and the hardware behind each claim.

Questions

Sources

1. Socio-economic impacts of quantum technologies in transport, UK Department for Transport, published November 14, 2024 (report PDF, prepared by Resonance, information as of April 30, 2024).
2. SandboxAQ and Acubed Achieve Progress in Magnetic Navigation, SandboxAQ post published by The Quantum Insider, July 16, 2025.
3. Q-CTRL and Leading UK Rail Organizations Optimize Train Scheduling Efficiency with Quantum Software, Q-CTRL press release, June 18, 2025.
4. IQM and Deutsche Bahn Demonstrate Quantum Algorithm for Railway Scheduling on Real Operational Data, IQM press release, July 20, 2026.
5. Un-jammable quantum tech takes flight to boost UK’s resilience against hostile actors, UK Government press release, May 13, 2024.
6. National Quantum Strategy Missions, UK Government (updated December 14, 2023).
7. Quantum sensing for gravity cartography, Stray et al., Nature, February 23, 2022.
8. Quantum Shuttle: Traffic Navigation with Quantum Computing, Yarkoni et al., arXiv:2006.14162, submitted June 23, 2020.
9. QI-TraSiCo, Quantum-Inspired Traffic Signal Control, DLR Quantum Computing Initiative (project September 1, 2023 to December 31, 2026).
10. Ayalon Highways and Quantum Art Partner to Bring Quantum Computing to Urban Traffic Planning, joint press release published by The Quantum Insider, October 22, 2025.
11. Quantum optimisation in cities: Limitations and prospects of urban transport systems, Xu, Niu, Nair and Dixit, arXiv:2604.02671, submitted April 3, 2026 (preprint).
12. Algorithms for Optimal Airport Operations, University of Hamburg, June 26, 2024.
13. Evaluating the Performance of Quantum Annealers and Classical Optimizers in Aircraft Container Loading Problem: A Feasibility Study, Sinno et al., APS Global Physics Summit, March 19, 2025 (abstract).
14. On the path towards a quantum economy, Physics World, April 16, 2025 (sponsored by the National Quantum Computing Centre).
15. Quantum-Accelerated Mixed-Integer Optimisation for Aircraft Loading, National Quantum Computing Centre project page.
16. QCMobility workshop in Ulm, DLR Quantum Computing Initiative, January 10, 2025.
17. QSH, Quantum computing for shipping and maritime logistics in Hamburg, Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and Services.
18. Untappable internet for Port of Rotterdam offered by quantum technology, Holland High Tech, October 7, 2022.
19. Timelines for migration to post-quantum cryptography, UK National Cyber Security Centre, March 20, 2025.
20. Quantum networking technologies, UK National Cyber Security Centre, August 5, 2025.
21. EU reinforces its cybersecurity with post-quantum cryptography, European Commission, June 23, 2025.
22. McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor 2026, April 2026 (travel, transport and logistics value estimate read from the report text).