Modeling and simulation with UML and Java

In this paper we describe a method for the use of the Java object-oriented programming language for simulation. Our approach is to use the Unified Modeling Language, recently proposed for general-purpose modeling and software engineering, as a modeling and simulation language with Java as the implementation platform. Using the Model-View-Controller design pattern, views are added to models for such purposes as statistics collection, animation, and checkpoint recording. Controllers are added to models to handle events, or in the case of a simulation, to synthetically generate events. CASE tools being developed for UML will include Java code generation, making the approach proposed in this paper a practical method for simulation modeling.