Bridging Classical Practices and Quantum Software Engineering: The QGen Toolkit and Orchestrator

PhD Project

Project Overview

This PhD project investigates how established software engineering practices from classical computing can be adapted to address key challenges in quantum software engineering, particularly portability, deployment, orchestration, and reproducibility. While quantum hardware platforms are advancing rapidly, quantum software remains fragmented, provider-specific, and difficult to integrate into practical computing environments.

The project will design and evaluate QGen, a toolkit for generating provider-agnostic, containerized quantum services, together with a QGen Orchestrator that manages the lifecycle of quantum workloads. The proposed framework will support the development, deployment, execution, and monitoring of quantum programs across heterogeneous quantum providers and cloud infrastructures.

Core Technical Elements

  • Provider-Independent Service Abstractions: For deploying quantum programs across multiple platforms seamlessly.
  • Containerization & Service-Oriented Design: Aligning quantum software development with modern enterprise cloud infrastructure.
  • Orchestration Layer: Scheduling and coordinating quantum jobs across various providers, considering real-time availability, queue times, execution variability, and cost metrics.
  • Monitoring & Result Aggregation: Supporting structured evaluation and experimental reproducibility.
  • Hybrid Workflows: Effective integration of quantum services into unified classical–quantum execution flows.

The research follows a practice-based, experimental methodology, combining artifact development with empirical evaluation across multiple quantum platforms using both simulators and physical quantum hardware.

Research Context & Motivation

Quantum computing faces a growing gap between hardware capability and software maturity. Current quantum development frameworks are tightly coupled to specific providers, leading to vendor lock-in, limited portability, and fragile deployment pipelines. At the same time, quantum workloads exhibit variability in availability and performance that existing tooling does not manage effectively.

Classical software engineering has successfully addressed similar challenges through service-oriented architecture (SOA), containerization, orchestration, and DevOps practices, which underpin reliable and scalable enterprise systems. However, these paradigms have not yet been systematically applied to the quantum software layer.

This project is motivated by the need to establish robust software engineering foundations for quantum computing, focusing on deployment, integration, and operational reliability rather than pure algorithmic innovation. By adapting proven classical practices to quantum workloads, this research aims to reduce vendor lock-in, improve operational predictability, enable hybrid classical–quantum integration, and support reproducibility in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) execution environments.

The ultimate outcome will be a set of validated software artifacts and design principles that contribute to making quantum computing more usable, portable, and scalable in real-world settings.

Application & Course Details

Interested candidates should review the formal course details below for their application:

Detail Specification
Course Title Computer Science and Informatics (PhD)
Mode of Attendance (MoA) Full-Time (FT)
Admissions Email gs.pgradmissions@hud.ac.uk

Supervisory Team