U88 - WP5 QUANTUM COMPUTING APPLICATION TO SENSOR MANAGEMENT

This work forms part of the project "AI and Autonomy for the ISR Enterprise" which seeks to release capacity and maximize understanding in our ISR enterprise in order to maintain Information Advantage. Specifically it will demonstrate a:

• World leading ISR capability, closely coupling 'exploit' and 'collect' throughout the ISR hierarchy, enabling collection tasking to be created dynamically and opportunistically, and AI enhanced PED from the core to the edge; and a

• Data-led and AI-enabled Intelligence Analysis function constrained by the available data, algorithms and computational power, rather than capacity of human operators.

The overall project is addressing one of the five core capability challenges identified in the 2020 MOD Science and Technology Strategy. It supports the development of generation-after-next capabilities. This requires it to work with cutting edge and innovative suppliers in industry and academia at pace.

Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Sensor Management can involve a variety of repeated, complex, high dimensional, near real time optimization calculations that are computationally very intensive. On current hardware, such calculations are not feasible for large numbers of sensors and/or significant, real-world scenario complexity. Quantum computing technology may potentially provide a means to overcome current processing limitations and deliver orders of magnitude improvement in speed for certain types of calculation, including optimization calculations.

The main focus of the proposed project is the research and development of quantum computer algorithms that support the types of battlefield Sensor Management optimization processes and scenario level data fusion processes of interest. The requirements that these processes need to meet are scenario dependent, time varying and non-linear. This means that the types and scope of application of quantum optimization and machine learning algorithms will need to be carefully considered by Suppliers.