Classical and Quantum Algorithms for the Principled Quantification of Infrastructure Safety

这项NSF拨款将开发新的量子算法，通过使用和模拟量子计算机来量化关键基础设施系统（如电网和供水网络）的故障几率。现有量子器件的使用已经从物理学扩展到材料、化学、优化和机器学习等领域。然而，这笔拨款将为一个新的应用领域创造量子算法，即关键基础设施工程，包括输电网，最终在资源有限的情况下支持风险知情决策。由于工程系统的复杂性日益增加，量化基础设施的性能在今天是出了名的具有挑战性，这项拨款通过利用量子信息处理相对于传统计算的新兴优势，响应了美国国家工程院和国家科学基金会对研究和实施的各种呼吁。这项拨款的执行可以通过跨越土木和基础设施工程、算法逻辑、代数优化和量子物理学的跨学科团队来实现。该团队的学科多样性也促进了基础设施安全主要领域以外的广泛培训、推广和传播，以切实推进量子计算应用，正如最近签署的《国家量子倡议法案》所预期的那样。该团队还将通过资助的研究生和本科生，为工程和科学领域培养新的算法专家队伍，同时向量子技术爱好者、行业专业人士和高中生伸出援手。量化关键基础设施的安全性、可靠性和弹性对于在资源有限的不确定情况下为运营提供信息和指导干预措施至关重要。然而，目前大多数量化网络指标的方法都依赖于数值模拟和启发式优化。虽然这些方法确实为基础设施利益相关者提供了见解，但它们无法以原则性的方式处理具有挑战性的条件，例如罕见事件可靠性估计或日益复杂的基础设施系统的最佳恢复决策。该团队采用各种新颖的基础设施安全评估策略来应对这些挑战。首先，该团队没有采用广泛使用的网络可靠性估计数值模拟，而是专注于计算系统配置的精确方法，这是由强大的符号逻辑张量网络（TNs）实现的。这些TNs有助于扩大可解决问题的规模边界，同时提供质量保证。其次，为了利用量子硬件的不断进步，该团队将把TN算法转换为量子版本，以计算可靠的网络配置并搜索最佳恢复序列。第三，该团队将在不同的量子硬件平台、仿真工具、输入分辨率水平和基础设施拓扑（包括现实输电网）上测试相对于最佳性能方法的经典和量子算法。这项测试活动将揭示量子电路的设置，这些设置最能影响计算时间、解决方案质量和其他支持基础设施安全评估的特性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This NSF grant will develop novel quantum algorithms to quantify the odds of failure of critical infrastructure systems, such as power grids and water networks, by using and simulating quantum computers. The use of existing quantum devices already extends beyond physics to materials, chemistry, optimization, and machine learning among other fields. However, this grant will create quantum algorithms for a new area of application, namely that of critical infrastructure engineering, which includes power transmission grids, to ultimately support risk‐informed decisions when resources are limited. As quantifying infrastructure performance is notoriously challenging today due to the increasing complexity of engineered systems, this grant responds to various calls for research and implementation from the National Academy of Engineering and the National Science Foundation, by exploiting the emerging advantages of quantum information processing over classical computing. The execution of this grant is possible through an interdisciplinary team spanning civil and infrastructure engineering, algorithmic logic, algebraic optimization, and quantum physics. The team’s disciplinary diversity also facilitates broad training, outreach, and dissemination beyond the primary field of infrastructure safety to tangibly advance quantum computing applications as anticipated by the National Quantum Initiative Act signed recently into law. The team will also seed a new workforce of algorithmicists for engineering and science, through funded graduate and undergraduate students, while reaching out to quantum technology enthusiasts, industry professionals, and high school students. Quantifying critical infrastructure safety, reliability and resilience is essential to inform operations and steer interventions under uncertainty with limited resources. However, most methods to quantify such network metrics rely on numerical simulation and heuristic optimization today. While these approaches do offer insights to infrastructure stakeholders, they are unable to handle, in a principled way, challenging conditions such as rare‐event reliability estimation or optimal restoration decisions for increasingly complex infrastructure systems. The team addresses these challenges with various novel strategies for infrastructure safety assessment. First, instead of adopting widely used numerical simulation for network reliability estimation, the team focuses on exact methods that count system configurations, as enabled by powerful symbolic logic tensor networks (TNs). These TNs help expand the size frontier of solvable problems while offering quality guarantees. Second, to leverage relentless progress on quantum hardware, the team will transform TN algorithms into their quantum versions to count reliable network configurations and search for optimal restoration sequences. Third, the team will test algorithms, classical and quantum, relative to best‐performing methods, across different quantum hardware platforms, simulation tools, input resolution levels, and infrastructure topologies, including realistic power transmission grids. This testing campaign will reveal the settings for quantum circuits that best impact computation time, solution quality and other features that support infrastructure safety assessment.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.