Constrained Quantum Annealing for Circuit Fault Diagnosis*

We present a very general construction for quantum annealing protocols for solving Circuit Fault Diagnosis (CFD) problems that restrict the evolution to the feasible space of solutions using all local driver terms. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach through simulations to show how our construction could be advantageous for near term quantum systems designed to tackle smaller scale CFD problems. Our approach also can be translated to the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) framework, where the driver terms act as the mixing operators that explore only the space of feasible configurations, rather than the whole space.