A crucial need arising in the development of complex hardware and software systems is to streamline Verification and Validation (V&V) procedures used to identify and eliminate design and implementation faults. For many systems, V&V is conducted on cyber-physical systems that can include hardware, software, and human operators in the loop. No one has ever developed a procedure to eliminate all errors from engineered systems, so the level of effort in conducting V&V is usually dictated by achieving an acceptable probability of correctness or, complementarily, an acceptable likelihood of failure. The V&V plan for large, complex systems tends to require ongoing adjustments, making it difficult to reliably estimate the cost of the V&V effort. These uncertainties can lead to cost overruns and delivery delays.
A quantum computer is a device that manipulates quantum bits (qubits) rather than classical bits that can be used to solve problems similar to those solved by classical computers. In a classical computer, each bit is represented by some physical device that is either off or on. The capability to compute difficult problems using classical computers is proportional to the number of instructions the computer can execute per unit of time. Classical computers can therefore be limited in procedures that use a very large number of steps to determine an answer. V&V of software in complex systems is such a problem. For example, the control system software of the F-35 aircraft comprises millions of lines of code. Investigating all potential errors in the code using classical methods may require more computational resources than are realistically feasible.