Abstract
This chapter provides an introductory overview of city logistics systems, highlighting the specific characteristics that make them different from general logistics problems. It analyzes the types of decisions involved in managing city logistics applications, from strategic, tactical, and operational, and identifies the key models to address them. This analysis identifies types of problems, location, location routing, and variants of routing problems with time windows, all those with ad hoc formulations, derived from the constraints imposed by policy and operational regulations, technological conditions, or other specificities of urban scenarios, which result in variants of the classical models that, for its size and complexity, become a fertile field for metaheuristic approaches to define algorithms to solve the problems. Some of the more relevant cases are studied in this chapter, and guidelines for further and deeper insights on other cases are provided to the reader through a rich set of bibliographical references.