  Trapped-ion quantum computers exhibit promising potential to provide
platforms for high-quality qubits and reliable quantum computation. The Quantum
Charge Coupled Device (QCCD) architecture offers a modular solution to enable
the realization of scalable quantum computers, paving the way for practical
quantum algorithms with large qubit numbers. Within these devices, ions can be
shuttled (moved) throughout the trap and through different dedicated zones,
e.g., a memory zone for storage and a processing zone for the actual
computation. However, due to the decoherence of the ions' quantum states, the
qubits lose their quantum information over time. Thus, the required time steps
of shuttling operations should be minimized. In this paper, we propose a
heuristic approach to finding an efficient shuttling schedule, which
orchestrates the movement operations within the device. Given a quantum
algorithm and a device architecture, the proposed algorithm produces shuttling
schedules with a close-to-minimal amount of time steps for small-size QCCD
architectures. Furthermore, even for large-scale QCCD devices, the empirical
evaluation shows promising results with respect to the quality of the solution
as well as performance.
