The $50M Delivery Route
Dedicated to my friend, mentor and a boss who stood up for me when no one else would, Dave Fellows. You encouraged me when I told you I was writing a book on quantum computing, and this is a step in that direction.
UPS reports that removing one mile from each driver's daily route can save up to $50 million a year.1 At fleet scale, a route planner can create real value without proving it has found the perfect route; a repeatable improvement is enough.
Even a route with only 20 stops admits
possible orderings, before time windows, vehicle capacity, driver hours, or traffic enter the model.
The notebook reduces the optimisation machinery to MaxCut on a triangle: three nodes, three edges, and eight colourings. We can enumerate every candidate, inspect every gate, and compare the circuit's samples with uniform random choice.