The flows of goods within cities have attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners in the field of logistics and supply chain as well as transport engineering. A main feature of this research field is the continuously change in the associated variables to the urban goods distribution (UGD) like the travel time, the customer orders, the traffic congestion among others, which has a direct impact to the stakeholders in city logistics (shippers, carriers, receivers, public administration, etc.). The microsimulation can be used to asses those changes and their impact in the optimization process of the UGD. In this paper, we make a review of some studies about the use of microsimulation as an optimization tool for the UGD and classify them according to its application and simulation paradigm. In the same way, we categorize these studies by the process that are modelling in order to generate a starting point for future research that until now has not been found in the literature.