  This paper investigates the application of quantum computing technology to
airline gate-scheduling quadratic assignment problems (QAP). We explore the
quantum computing hardware architecture and software environment required for
porting classical versions of these type of problems to quantum computers. We
discuss the variational quantum eigensolver and the inclusion of
space-efficient graph coloring to the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary
Optimization (QUBO). These enhanced quantum computing algorithms are tested
with an 8 gate and 24 flight test case using both the IBM quantum computing
simulator and a 27 qubit superconducting transmon IBM quantum computing
hardware platform.
