  The Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, is one of the biggest
technology conferences in Europe, attended by tens of thousands of people every
year. The high influx of people into Lisbon causes significant stress on the
city's transit services for the duration of the conference. For the Web Summit
2019, Volkswagen AG partnered with the city of Lisbon for a pilot project to
provide quantum computing-based traffic optimization. A two-phase solution was
implemented: the first phase used data science techniques to analyze the
movement of people from previous conferences to build temporary new bus routes
throughout the city. The second phase used a custom Android navigation app
installed in the buses operated by Carris, powered by a quantum optimization
service provided by Volkswagen that connected to live traffic data and a D-Wave
quantum processing unit to optimize the buses' routes in real-time. To our
knowledge, this is the first commercial application that depends on a quantum
processor to perform a critical live task.
