P10: Seamless Development of Quantum Software with Stakeholder-Specific Views (MoQel)

Members: Joshua Ammermann (KIT), Wolfgang Mauerer (OTH), Ina Schaefer (KIT), Lukas Schmidbauer (OTH)

Use cases for quantum computing rely on various forms of model abstractions to describe a problem of computational interest, and derive — via suitable transformations that preserve properties of interest — a compute task for either digital or analogue quantum computers. Such different computational models need to be considered upfront by means of abstractions, as it is plausible that different computational models will provide different advantages depending on the computational task. While hardware for quantum computers has improved significantly over the last decade, software is still crafted with means that lag behind the state-of-the-art in software engineering.

We see a lack of appropriate modeling formalisms that provide different useful levels of abstraction and expressiveness. To go from a domain-specific problem to a sequence of executable computational steps, we lack well-defined transformations with known guarantees between different model abstractions. To ensure that models can be understood and interpreted, we lack appropriate views of such models, adapted to the needs of different stakeholders, from fundamental physics to applied engineering.

We will address this gap by systematically applying model-based and view-based development, which have been successfully applied in classical computer science, to quantum computing. We will study these concepts for digital and analogue quantum computing in an interdisciplinary and multi-domain approach and develop a seamless (model-based) development methodology for quantum software with stakeholder-specific views.