A Quantum Algorithm for Network Reliability

Building a network that is resilient to a component failure is vital. Our access to electricity and telecommunications or the internet of things all hinge on an uninterrupted service provided by a robust network. Calculating the network reliability $R$ is $\sharp$P-complete and intractable to calculate exactly for medium and large networks. Here, we present an explicit, circuit-level implementation of a quantum algorithm that computes $R$. Our algorithm requires $O(EV/ε)$ gate operations and $O(E)$ qubits, where $V$ and $E$ are the number of nodes and edges in the graph and $ε$ is the uncertainty in the reliability estimation. This constitutes a significant polynomial speedup over the best classical approaches currently known. We further provide quantum gate counts, relevant for both pre-fault-tolerant and fault-tolerant regimes, sufficient to compute $R$.