Artinian rings, finite principal ideal rings and algebraic error-correcting codes

This thesis contains structure theorems for several types of Artinian rings, in particular, finite rings, commutative Artinian rings containing an identity, finite commutative rings containing an identity, and semisimple Artinian semigroup-graded rings. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to Artinian rings, semigroup-graded rings and some algebraic coding theory. Except for a small percentage of lemmas which are referenced, all the theory contained in Chapters 2 to 5 is new. It is original work either by myself or in collaboration with my supervisor Andrei V. Kelarev. Some results obtained while conducting my Ph.D. research have appeared in [8] to [22].