Quantum Computing Approaches for Mission Covering Optimization

We study quantum computing algorithms for solving certain constrained resource allocation problems we coin as Mission Covering Optimization (MCO). We compare formulations of constrained optimization problems using Quantum Annealing techniques and the Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (Hadfield et al. arXiv:1709.03489v2, a generalized algorithm of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm, Farhi et al. arXiv:1411.4028v1) on D-Wave and IBM machines respectively using the following metrics: cost, timing, constraints held, and qubits used. We provide results from two different MCO scenarios and analyze results.