The BMW Group is endowing RWTH Aachen University with a new professorship in “Quantum Information Systems” in the Department of Computer Science. Prof Dr Dominique Unruh will head the chair. In addition, the funding of an endowed chair at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has already been approved. The Chair of Quantum Algorithms and Applications will be headed by Prof. Dr Barbara Kraus.

Our goal is to create an open software ecosystem that optimally integrates quantum software and hardware and thus accelerates the industrialization of automotive applications. This is precisely where endowed professors at universities such as the Technical University of Munich and RWTH Aachen make an important contribution to jointly creating pioneering innovations.

—Alexander Buresch, Senior Vice President BMW Group IT

Over the past seven years, the BMW Group’s commitment to research into quantum computing has led to an increasingly far-reaching understanding of the technology. At the same time, the company is reaching the limits of conventional hardware due to ever larger and more complex optimization problems, simulations and applications of artificial intelligence.

For years, we have been involved in many consortium projects in the fields of battery production, artificial intelligence and system engineering, in bilateral contract research and in the joint organisation of education and research, and now we are also increasingly active in the promising field of quantum computing technology. As a mentor for this exciting and important future topic for the BMW Group, I am looking forward to working with Prof Dr Unruh and Prof Dr Kraus and to the results of our joint research.

—Stefan Floeck, Senior Vice President Product Line MINI and Compact Class BMW

Quantum computing was identified back in 2017 as a potential answer to the end of Moore’s Law, which means that the computing power available worldwide will no longer continue to increase exponentially as before. The BMW Group therefore established a dedicated quantum computing team that is already contributing to the company’s value creation by reformulating real-world problems from development, production, distribution and many other areas and solving them with quantum (inspired) algorithms.

In collaboration with Amazon Web Services, for example, the movements of robot arms during the sealing of the underbody were optimized and it was discovered that quantum computing-inspired algorithms have the potential to reduce the cycle time at the Munich plant by up to 10%.

Other promising use cases include the simulation of battery and fuel cells, numerical simulations of vehicle aerodynamics and acoustics, efficient training of machine learning models and many other areas. Today, the processing of such computationally intensive processes often represents the bottleneck in the development of new applications and products.

The BMW Group is a co-founder of QUTAC (Quantum Technology & Application Consortium), in which eleven of the largest German companies are working together to advance quantum computing from an industrial perspective and conduct application-related research. The BMW Group is also a member of a total of four funded projects that bring together excellent academic partners with commercial enterprises and start-ups with different focuses in order to investigate the potential of quantum computing using real industry use cases.