Optimization wearing a hard hat
Logistics is the optimization page made concrete: which container goes on which ship, which crane unloads it, which truck takes it, which crew flies the plane. Global supply chains burn enormous compute on these questions, margins are thin, and a percentage point of efficiency is worth real money, which is why logistics operators were among the first to run quantum pilots.
Everything honest from the optimization page applies unchanged: classical solvers are excellent, no quantum advantage has been demonstrated on a production logistics problem, and today's pilots are about readiness and workflow engineering.
Documented programs
Airbus made aerospace optimization problems public in its 2019 Quantum Computing Challenge. Aircraft loading and trajectory optimization posed as open research problems. ExxonMobil and IBM published research on formulating maritime shipping routing for quantum algorithms. Tens of thousands of merchant ships route around the planet, so even the formulation work is instructive. Port and freight operators have run annealing-based scheduling experiments with hardware partners.
The pattern across all of them: real operational problems, real data, honest research papers. Results measured against learning value, not classical-beating performance. When a logistics pilot claims savings, ask the evaluating-claims question: compared to which classical baseline?
The honest caveat: Every pilot competes with world-class classical operations-research solvers.