While you’re figuring out how much you’ve spent on online shopping this month, NTU mathematicians are crunching numbers to a multibillion-dollar equation. Online retailers like Amazon, who spent about US$30 billion on shipping in 2018, sometimes hold orders and combine them into a single shipment.

But deciding how long to wait is a surprisingly complex mathematical problem. One thing’s for sure, you can count on the NTU team to crack the code of a new order fulfilment model that satisfies both you and retailers.

This story was published in the Oct-Dec 2022 issue of HEY!. To read it and other stories from this issue in PDF format, click here.