At the beginning of each day of the simulation, you are given a list of customer orders that are ready to be shipped from the warehouse. Each line gives you the city name, and the order amount for that city. You must schedule your trucks to make trips that deliver these orders by first specifying the sequence of cities to visit, then schedule one of the trucks in your fleet to make this trip. When you have assigned all customer orders to trips and assigned a truck for each trip, you can advance to the next day and see the results. The game ends after a fixed number of days. At the end, you will be given a score based on how well you did. Naturally, the more orders you fulfill and the less trips/trucks you use, the higher your score will be.

The game is probably too bland and esoteric for most, especially since there is no randomness (a tornado that wipes out 10% of your fleet would have made a good challenge). Still, The Transportation Games does a good job of introducing the concepts of routing and efficiency optimization of a transportation system. If you are interested in economics, business, or industrial engineering, The Transportation Game is a good learning tool. If you prefer a business-level perspective, check out The Distribution Game by the same author on this site.

Note: there is only one scenario included with the game, although you can edit it using a spreadsheet program such as Excel to create more.