Quantum Leap: North Wales police harnesses quantum annealing for faster emergency response

In the vast, rural expanse of North Wales, cutting emergency response times is more than a technical challenge, it’s a matter of public safety. North Wales Police, led by Advanced Analytics and AI Lead Alistair Hughes, is now pioneering the first use of quantum computing in UK policing to revolutionise how officers are deployed across the region.

The challenge: halving response times

The force faced a daunting target, to halve response times from ten minutes to just five, a goal that demanded a complete rethink of traditional policing strategies. Conventional approaches, such as clustering officers around known crime hotspots, might have improved response in urban centres, but would have left vast rural areas dangerously underserved. In North Wales, this would have meant that up to half a million residents, many living in remote communities, could be left without adequate emergency cover.

The challenge was not just about speed, but about fairness and equity, ensuring that every community, no matter how isolated, could rely on timely police support. This dilemma highlighted the limitations of existing methods and underscored the need for innovative solutions that could balance rapid response with comprehensive geographical coverage, without sacrificing officer well-being or operational sustainability.

Alistair Hughes, who joined North Wales Police eight years ago after a long and accomplished career, from technology start-ups to a range of ventures in software companies, led a team to explore solutions such as annealing quantum computing, which could handle the conflicting objectives of minimising response times and maximising coverage in a way that previous approaches could not.

“We had previously tried to optimise forward deployment using Excel to analyse data, and heat maps, which is very time consuming, and would take two analysts over three months to calculate,” Alistair recalled.

“The problem we faced was even bigger than we expected as we were also going to measure the time from when the call came in rather than when the car was dispatched, which effectively knocked another five minutes off. So, a 20-minute target, became suddenly a ten-minute target,” explained Alistair.

Enter quantum annealing

A chance encounter with D-Wave, a quantum computing company, opened new possibilities.

Annealing quantum computing is a computational technique that leverages quantum mechanics to solve problems by searching for the lowest-energy (best) solution in a landscape of possible solutions. It’s especially useful for optimization, sampling, and certain types of machine learning problems.

Rather than storing information using bits represented by 0s or 1s as conventional digital computers do, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, to encode information as 0s, 1s, or both at the same time. This superposition of states, along with the other quantum mechanical phenomena of entanglement and tunnelling, enables quantum computers to manipulate enormous combinations of states at once².

In annealing quantum computing, the system explores a vast landscape of possible solutions more efficiently, using quantum tunnelling to move rapidly between energy states. The process is similar to how, in metallurgy, annealing involves slowly cooling a material to reach a stable, low-energy configuration. The number of potential states increases exponentially with the number of qubits; D-Wave has now built systems with over 4400 qubits³.

Here, the ‘cooling’ is done by gradually reducing quantum fluctuations, allowing the system to settle into its lowest energy state, the optimal solution to the problem at hand. This approach is especially powerful for optimisation tasks where there are many conflicting objectives or constraints, as it can efficiently search for the best arrangement among countless possibilities.

“Quantum optimisation of forward deployment basically is using quantum algorithms running on a hybrid quantum annealer to speed up and improve the accuracy of our forward deployment locations. Enabling us to minimise the response time but at the same time maximise the geographical coverage”
Alistair Hughes, Advanced Analytics and AI Lead, North Wales Police

How does it work?

For the technically curious, Alistair offered a digestible summary: “D-Wave’s hybrid-quantum technology enables you to do all of the processing for the quantum optimisation and data preparation in one hit by using both the classical and the quantum computer which talk to each other. The classical computer handles data preparation, while the annealing quantum computer finds the optimal solution.”

A Hackathon Breakthrough

After connecting with D-Wave, Alistair and the team were invited to participate in a competition that brought together experts to tackle real-world problems using quantum computing. In 2024, the Hackathon was a pivotal moment in the development of the quantum optimisation project for North Wales Police.

Over several intense 20-hour sessions in a small room filled with whiteboards and brainstorming, the team worked alongside D-Wave specialists to test whether quantum annealing could solve the complex challenge of police deployment.

It was during this event that the team discovered quantum optimisation could reduce processing times from four months to four minutes, a breakthrough that validated the potential of quantum technology for operational policing and set the stage for further innovation.

Ethics, Wellbeing and Practicality

However, the project wasn’t just about speed. Ethical, wellbeing and practical considerations were at the heart of every decision.

As Alistair explained, simply optimising for response times could have led to unintended consequences such as officers being dispatched so far from their home base that, by the end of a shift, someone stationed in Pwllheli might find themselves in Chester, facing a three-hour drive home.

This scenario was clearly unsustainable and unjustifiable on a daily basis. To address this, the team made a conscious decision to focus optimisation efforts on one Local Policing Area (LPA) at a time, ensuring that officers would not be sent unreasonably far from their communities.

Beyond geography, the project also took into account the importance of team camaraderie, the health risks of spending long hours in vehicles and the need for officers to return to station for desk duties and social connection.

The solution was to “parameterise” the system, allowing real-time adjustments for the number of officers and vehicles available each day, so the model could be rerun and re-optimised as needed. This flexible, human-centred approach ensured that operational efficiency never came at the expense of officer wellbeing or ethical policing.

“Parameterise your solution if you want it to be applicable in multiple cases. The solution produced with annealing quantum computing could take your processing down from four months to four minutes. It’s possible to incorporate the soft constraints when you’re changing practices, it’s not just a technical solution, it’s a process and it’s possible to build the soft constraints of wellbeing not just into the mathematics, but into the way you approach the solution,” Alistair clarified.

Future Potential

While the project is not yet live, a major outcome of the initiative is a standalone app that visualises deployment recommendations in real time. The app can provide clear guidance on where police vehicles should be stationed, how many should be deployed at each location, incident counts within each area, and average response times.

“At the moment it’s a standalone app, it lets people know exactly where the cars should be deployed, how many should be deployed at each location, how many incidents have occurred in that location’s sphere of access, and also gives average response times.”
Alistair Hughes, Advanced Analytics and AI Lead, North Wales Police

The next phase will focus on refining the algorithm and integrating machine learning to predict demand more accurately, allowing the quantum system to optimise deployment even further.

While the solution was designed to address the unique rural challenges of North Wales, its potential reaches far beyond. Alistair envisions applications not only in other police forces but also across emergency services and national agencies, particularly those involved in logistics and resource deployment. The flexibility and scalability of the technology mean it could transform how organisations respond to complex, real-world problems.

A Milestone for Innovation and Public Service

North Wales Police’s quantum project stands as more than just a technological achievement, it is a testament to the power of innovation, ethical leadership and the spirit of public service.

“Quantum computing as a solution is actually already here, if you’ve got an optimisation problem, the solution is already here,” stated Alistair.

Now, the project’s success paves the way for a future where advanced technology and human values work hand in hand to deliver better outcomes for communities. As the world’s first use of quantum optimisation in policing, North Wales Police has set a new benchmark for how innovation can be harnessed responsibly.

Alistair Hughes
Advanced Analytics and AI Lead
North Wales Police