NEWCASTLE UN IVERS ITY OF A Framework for Supporting Automatic Simulation Generation from Design by

ii 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