Overview of techniques for model-driven development of a simulation package

We propose model-driven development as a good choice for developing a simulator with decreased development time and increased stability and maintainability compared to traditional development techniques. Although the meta-model for the simulation model is not always known or well defined in most commercial or academic simulation software packages, all simulators use such a meta-model throughout different components of the simulator like the model editor or the simulation core. Model-driven development uses a clearly defined meta-model as a basis for generating different artifacts, ranging from executable source code to documentation files. In this paper, we present a software architecture based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) in combination with the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) as basic model-driven frameworks for data-layer and graphical user interface of a simulation software package.