Ayalon Highways and Quantum Art Partner to Apply Quantum Computing to Urban Traffic Management
Israel's largest transportation organization is collaborating with Quantum Art to test quantum computing algorithms for citywide traffic optimization, potentially reducing travel times and emissions while addressing the complex coordination challenges of urban congestion.
Ayalon Highways, Israel's largest transportation and traffic management organization, has announced a partnership with Quantum Art to apply quantum computing to citywide traffic optimization. The collaboration will test quantum-driven traffic management against today's leading classical tools on a citywide scale, focusing on reducing travel time through smart, near real-time traffic light management.
The initiative addresses the significant economic and environmental costs of urban congestion. Across the United States, gridlock costs billions of dollars annually, with a 2024 report estimating $74 billion in lost time alone. Coordinating hundreds of intersections simultaneously presents a challenging combinatorial problem that current tools struggle to solve at full city network scale in near real time.
Tal Elimelech, Director of Experimental Transportation Systems and Innovative Mobility Solutions at Ayalon Highways, emphasized the potential impact: "We believe quantum computing can help us manage hundreds of intersections in near real time, to provide benefits to commuters, businesses and the environment. The economic impact of upgrading our capabilities using quantum computing is expected to be huge."
Quantum Art's trapped-ion quantum computing architecture, which features high connectivity, multi-qubit gates, and dynamically reconfigurable multi-core computing, is particularly well-suited for network-like optimization problems. This makes the technology ideal for complex traffic coordination across metropolitan areas where traditional computing approaches face limitations.
Initial project efforts will concentrate on reducing average travel time, with longer-term goals including lowering emissions, shortening pedestrian wait times, and reducing stop frequency. The partnership could eventually expand to include heavy truck routing, bus scheduling, parking optimization, and shuttle services. These scheduling applications extend beyond transportation to numerous other industries facing similar coordination challenges.
Dr. Tal David, CEO and co-founder of Quantum Art, explained the fundamental advantage of quantum computing for traffic management: "Cities struggle every day with gridlock because traffic systems can't coordinate at scale. Quantum computing is built for exactly this type of problem. Working with Ayalon Highways lets us demonstrate how our technology can reduce travel times, improve safety, and make daily life easier for millions of people."
The collaboration represents one of the first large-scale applications of quantum computing to real-world urban infrastructure challenges. To learn more about Quantum Art's technology, please visit https://www.quantum-art.tech/. The partnership signals growing recognition of quantum computing's potential to solve complex optimization problems that have long challenged classical computing approaches in critical infrastructure management.