A UML tool for an automatic generation of simulation programs

For sometime now, Unified Modelling Language (UML) has been accepted as a standard for designing new systems. Its array of notations helps system designers to capture their ideas in a way that is expressive yet easy to understand. One thing that UML lacks though, is a means for predicting the system's performance directly from its design. Performance prediction is a desirable feature that enables us to evaluate whether a particular design is worth implementing or not. This prediction can frequently be obtained by constructing a simulation program that mimics the characteristics of the new system. The information gathered from running the simulation will then allow us to estimate the performance. In this paper, we present a simulation framework that can be used to generate simulation programs straight from UML notations. We also present a tool has been built to demonstrate the feasibility of using this framework to perform such a transformation automatically.