Variational quantum approaches have shown great promise in finding near-optimal
solutions to computationally challenging tasks. Nonetheless, enforcing constraints in a
disciplined fashion has been largely unexplored. To address this gap, this work proposes a
hybrid quantum-classical algorithmic paradigm termed VQEC that extends the celebrated
VQE to handle optimization with constraints. As with the standard VQE, the vector of
optimization variables is captured by the state of a variational quantum circuit (VQC). To deal …

Variational quantum approaches have shown great promise in finding near-optimal
solutions to computationally challenging tasks. Nonetheless, enforcing constraints in a
disciplined fashion has been largely unexplored. To address this gap, this work proposes a
hybrid quantum-classical algorithmic paradigm termed VQEC that extends the celebrated
VQE to handle optimization with constraints. As with the standard VQE, the vector of
optimization variables is captured by the state of a variational quantum circuit (VQC). To deal …