Toyota Motor has implemented a quantum-inspired production instruction system at its Tsutsumi car production plant. The new system, developed by Fujitsu, incorporates optimisation techniques from quantum computing that are able to tackle production problems that are difficult to compute using conventional hardware.

The Tsutsumi plant in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, is the “home” of the Prius hybrid and one of five eco-factories globally operated by Toyota Motor Corporation.

The new production instruction system was implemented by Fujitsu together with Toyota Systems. The system utilises algorithms obtained from quantum effect simulations on classical computing architectures that provide significant performance and scalability improvements over conventional software. The algorithms are incorporated into a Digital Annealer that provides combinatorial optimisation of complex manufacturing and production problems.

Fujitsu’s Quantum-Inspired Digital Annealer technology was first developed and employed by Toyota Systems in 2020 in a project to optimise supply chain and logistics network operations supporting Toyota Motor car production.

This latest instance is the first use case in Japan in which Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer technology has been applied to streamline car production operations.

The new system enables efficient and high-speed solution searching by utilising constraint processing technology to express complex business constraints in equations and inequalities, a proprietary technology available since the third generation of the Digital Annealer—the processing technology was developed by Fujitsu Research based on its long-time expertise in the manufacturing industry.

The new vehicle production instruction system will enable Toyota Motor Corporation to respond quickly to production fluctuations and also reduce the workload of its employees.

Toyota Systems and Fujitsu plan to expand the system to Toyota Motor Corporation’s other plants in Japan and, in the future, to Toyota Motor Corporation’s overseas plants.

From October 2022, Fujitsu will commercially launch its “Fujitsu Computing as a Service (CaaS)” service portfolio in Japan, which will provide advanced computing technologies such as the Digital Annealer and software technologies to regular commercial users, aiming to lower the barrier to access high performance computing resources and technologies like AI. Fujitsu plans to roll-out the service globally to markets outside of Japan from fiscal 2023.