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Farmers in Colombia have faced economic instability due to a long-lasting armed conflict. An attempt to support the rural community has been through the creation of productive alliances – a strategic association between small-scale producers and anchor companies with the assistance of the private and public sectors. By closely examining the Association of Guarupay Palm Growers (ASOPAY)'s financial cash flows, this study investigates the challenges faced by small-scale agribusinesses in an emerging economy.

This study addresses the situation of ASOPAY, an oil palm productive alliance formed by families displaced by the Colombian armed conflict and relocated in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains. By closely examining ASOPAY's financial flows, the article sheds light on the economic incentives enhancing the cohesion of the small-farmers’ association.

A key finding is the critical role played by institutional efforts focused by promoting policies to enhance producers income. In addition, technological transfers made through technical assistance programs may improve the association's profitability by enhancing agronomic practices, while decreasing palm mortality and disease incidence.

The relatively small sample used in the study might rise concerns regarding the generalization of the outcomes. However, the authors implemented strategies to overcome these limitations by incorporating the inputs from experts on the oil palm supply chain in Colombia and from experts in rural development.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study analyzing the financial success of small farmers in post-conflict zones.

To solve the problem, a mathematical model is proposed; it relies on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), in which arcs are used to indicate whether a pair of appointments can be assigned to the same route or not (and so to the same care worker). The proposed model aims at minimizing the personnel required to meet daily demand and balancing workloads among the workers while considering the varying traffic patterns derived from traffic congestion.

This paper aims at providing solution approaches for addressing the problem of assigning care workers to deliver home health-care (HHC) services, demanding different skills each. First, a capacity planning problem is considered, where it is necessary to define the number of workers required to satisfy patients' requests and then, patients are assigned to the care workers along with the sequence followed to visit them, thus solving a scheduling problem. The benefits obtained by permitting patients to propose multiple time slots where they can be served are also explored.

The results indicate that the problem can be efficiently solved for medium-sized instances, that is, up to 100 daily patient requests. It is also indicated that asking patients to propose several moments when they can receive services helps to minimize the need for care workers through more efficient route allocations without affecting significantly the balance of the workloads.

This article provides a new framework for modeling and solving a HHC routing problem with multiskilled personnel. The proposed model can be used to identify efficient daily plans and can handle realistic characteristics such as time-dependent travel times or be extended to other real-life applications such as maintenance scheduling problems.