Integrated strategic and tactical design of multi-echelon city distribution systems with vehicles synchronization: A case of the Greater Montréal area

•Address a novel two-echelon City Logistics networks design problem.•Incorporate the new constraint of both echelons’ vehicles synchronization.•Formulate a large-scale mixed integer programming model.•Propose a new decomposition based exact method to solve the problem.•Apply and validate through a case study in the greater Montréal area.