Smallholders are small-scale agriculture models that usually support the life of a single family.
They are producing about one-third of the population's food supply. With the increase in population, food production should increase to go with this demand. Food production should be doubled by 2025.
However, increasing yield is not the only problem that smallholders face as they encounter challenges in production, ergonomics, delivery, and increase in raw material price due to many factors. Therefore, there is an urgent need to optimize different fronts in the agriculture supply chain. Unfortunately, many of these challenges are intractable and special algorithms need to be deployed to overcome them. As part of the SMALLDERS initiative, our team proposes a system to help smallholders make impactful decisions and rapidly access different scenarios.
Specifically, we turned to simulation and optimization to find suitable solutions to the problems at hand while considering the ergonomic and environmental sides.

We present a detailed literature review as it is an efficient technique to review the results among previous studies. This work aims to shed light on the smallholders' problems that the SMALLDERS projects can offer support with, as well as the different methodologies researchers used to tackle these problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to do so.