Quantum Artificial Intelligence for mission-critical systems: Foundations, architectural elements, and future directions

Abstract

Mission critical (MC) applications such as defense operations, energy management, cybersecurity, and aerospace control require reliable, deterministic, and low-latency decision making under uncertainty. Although the classical Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are effective, they often struggle to meet the stringent constraints of robustness, timing, explainability, and safety in the MC domains. Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI), the fusion of artificial intelligence and quantum computing (QC), can potentially provide transformative solutions to the challenges faced by classical ML models. QAI is a broader umbrella than Quantum Machine Learning (QML) and additionally includes quantu..