Case Article—Locating a Truck Terminal in Texas

Abstract

This case study introduces students to the decision-making process of a facility location problem and requires them to apply appropriate methods to recommend a desirable terminal location for CBT, a transportation provider in the United States. In response to the increasing number of drivers in the Texas market, CBT explored different options to better serve the rising demand, including a new and second terminal in a different geographic area. Students employ multi-criteria decision-making framework and optimization modeling to support their analysis using empirical data. While students use provided data to solve the problem in the base case, they need to research various publicly available databases in the case extension. This case can be used in undergraduate courses in logistics, transportation, operations, and supply chain management to apply facility location related concepts, or in a business analytics course to illustrate optimization modeling in a real-world context. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.2022.0042ca . The Teaching Note is available at https://www.informs.org/Publications/Subscribe/Access-Restricted-Materials .