Translating activity cycle diagrams to Java simulation programs

Abstract

The activity cycle diagrams are a simple notation to model discrete-event simulation systems. Its informality makes it very useful when communicating the model to non-specialists; however, it also makes the automatic code generation very difficult. Some extensions have been proposed to augment the representation power of ACD and some formalization has been suggested to enable automatic translation to program. Java is becoming a widespread object oriented programming language. We present an automatic translation from an extended ACD to a Java program. The translator has been successfully used in a groupware for simulation development environment named GroupSim.