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Distribution is a major activity of supply chain operations and contributes significantly to total logistics costs (Ballou, 2004). Consequently, over the last five decades, both professionals and academics have devoted considerable efforts to improve and streamline key distribution processes. Considerable attention has been focused on city logistics environments, and. in particular, on dynamic incident handling through real-time fleet management (Crainic, Gendreau, & Potvin, 2009; Awasthi, Chauhan, Parent, & Proth, 2011). In an urban environment, the use of an initial distribution plan, although necessary, is by no means sufficient to address unexpected events that may have adverse effects on the performance of delivery execution (Zeimpekis, Tatarakis, Giaglis, & Minis, 2007). Table 1 presents a typical classification of incidents and their effects on goods delivery.
Table 1. Dynamic incidents in urban freight distributions
| Source of incident | Incident | Effect in delivery |
| Road Infrastructure & Environment | Traffic congestion, adverse weather conditions, road construction, flea markets, protests | Increased vehicle travel time |
| Customers | No available unloading area, problems with the delivered products (e.g. wrong order) | Longer customer service times |
| New customer requests (delivery or pickup), | Increased demand |
| Delivery Vehicle | Car accident, mechanical failure | Customer Service interruption |
Various systems have been developed for fleet monitoring and incident detection in urban environments (see Powell, 1990; Savelsbergh & Sol, 1997; Gendreau, Laporte, & Semet, 2001; Slater, 2002; Ichoua, 2003; Kim, Lewis, & White, 2005; Cheung, Choy, Li, Shi, & Tang, 2008). However, most of these systems typically focus on handling customer orders that arrive during the execution of the delivery plan and need to be assigned to vehicles en route (Gendreau & Potvin, 1998; Yan, Jaillet, & Mahmassani, 1999; Fleischmann, Gietz, & Grutzmann, 2004; Cheung et al., 2008).