A framework for supporting automatic simulation generation from design

Abstract

Building a new software system requires careful planning and investigation in order to avoid any problems in the later stages of the development. By using a universally accepted design notation such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), ambiguities in the system specification can be eliminated or minimised. The aspect that frequently needs to be investigated before the implementation stage can be commenced concerns the proposed system’s performance. It is necessary to predict whether a particular design will meet the performance requirement - i.e. is it worth implementing the system - or not. One way to obtain this performance prediction is by using simulation programs to mimic the execution of the system. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to transform the design into a simulation program without some sound knowledge of simulation techniques. In addition, new simulation programs need to be built each time for different systems - which can be tedious, time consuming and error prone. The currently available UML tools do not provide any facilities for generating simulation programs automatically from UML specifications. This shortcoming is the main motivation for this research. The work involved here includes an investigation of which UML design notations can be used; the available simulation languages or environments for running the simulation; and more importantly, a framework that can capture the simulation information from UML design notation. Using this framework, we have built tools that enable an automatic transformation of a UML design notation into a simulation program. Two tools (parsers) that can perform such a transformation have been constructed. We provide case studies to demonstrate the applicability of these tools and the usefulness of our simulation framework in general.