Understanding Universal Product Code—A Study and Simulation Experiments

Given the importance of computers in the world today, almost every item produce is calculated, quantified and documented. It is, therefore, crucial for human societies to develop methods of facilitating these processes. The Universal Production Code (UPC) is one such method, a standard which not many consumers have knowledge of but in probability encounter items with the UPC code on a daily basis. The importance of the UPC as well as its ubiquity serves as the motivation of the following paper. It mainly consists of research that is readily available online but also explores how the coding, the application of parity error check, and the mod theory application are involved to the UPC. The paper also presents some useful simulation experiments in MATLAB as teaching aid.