Applications and extensions of the unified modelling language UML 2 for discrete event simulation

Due to the close relation between object-oriented modelling and the domain of discrete event simulation (DES) the Unified Modelling Language (UML) has in the past been frequently applied for simulation modelling. However, most of this work is restricted to particular application domains or diagram types and based on the UML 1.x versions that had some drawbacks concerning dynamic modelling and formal precision. In this paper we provide a short overview of the new UML version 2.0 and sum up its benefits for discrete event simulation. We evaluate related work concerning the use of UML in DES and state some general directives of how to apply several diagram types. The treatment concentrates on UML 2 activity diagrams and relates them to the well-known DES modelling world views. Finally we provide an outlook on our further work that is especially concerned with generating simulation code from UML diagrams for our Java-based simulation framework DESMO-J.