MDE4QAI: Towards Model-Driven Engineering for Quantum Artificial Intelligence

Over the past decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has provided enormous new possibilities and opportunities, but also new demands and requirements for software systems. In particular, Machine Learning (ML) has proven useful in almost every vertical application domain. Although other sub-disciplines of AI, such as intelligent agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) did not become promoted to the same extent, they still possess the potential to be integrated into the mainstream technology stacks and ecosystems, for example, due to the ongoing prevalence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). However, in the decade ahead, an unprecedented paradigm shift from classical computing towards Quantum Computing (QC) is expected, with perhaps a quantum-classical hybrid model. We expect the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm to be an enabler and a facilitator, when it comes to the quantum and the quantum-classical hybrid applications as it has already proven beneficial in the highly complex domains of IoT, smart CPS and AI with inherently heterogeneous hardware and software platforms, and APIs. This includes not only automated code generation, but also automated model checking and verification, as well as model analysis in the early design phases, and model-to-model transformations both at the design-time and at the runtime. In this paper, the vision is focused on MDE for Quantum AI, and a holistic approach integrating all of the above.