Quantum Assisted Combinatorial Benders' Algorithm for the Synergy of Hydrogen and Power Distribution Systems With Mobile Storage

The growth of hydrogen infrastructure is expected to aid in the integration of fluctuating renewable energy in distribution systems. To leverage the hydrogen system flexibility, this work presents a mixed-binary quadratic program (MBQP) model for synergistic operations of hydrogen and power distribution systems, wherein truck-mounted mobile hydrogen storage facilities are modeled for the schedule of their routes and loading/unloading quantities. A quantum-assisted combinatorial Benders' decomposition algorithm is designed for our MBQP model to deploy the solving of master and sub-problems on a quantum processing unit (QPU) and a classical CPU, respectively. The master problem is reformulated as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, which can be efficiently solved by quantum annealers. The proposed approach was tested on a hybrid quantum annealing and classical computing platform. Results show a trend to outperform the CPU-based commercial solvers as the problem scale increases.