D-Wave’s quantum annealers can only work with problems formulated as collections of binary variables. That is, values that can only be 0 or 1. Every aspect of your problem must be translated into this framework. If you’re scheduling nurses, each potential assignment becomes a binary variable: “Nurse Sarah works Monday morning shift” is either true (1) or false (0). If you are routing delivery trucks, “Truck goes from Location A to Location B” is either yes (1) or no (1).
This seems simple enough, but the requirement runs deeper. Not only must your variables be binary, but the relationships between variables and your optimization objective must be expressible as an energy function over these binary states. Essentially, you need to map your entire problem onto a mathematical structure that looks like a system of interacting magnets, where each magnet can point up or down, and you’re searching for the lowest-energy configuration.