3 February 2015

Post date: Feb 9, 2015 1:58:38 PM

I (Stuart Rossiter) gave an informal discussion on using UML to help in the conceptual design of simulations (as well as the software design where UML is more typically used).

The focus was on class diagrams, but other diagrams were mentioned (sequence, activity, deployment, package). Fowler's "UML Distilled" was mentioned as a good textbook, but it's focused on UML for software design and so can potentially be confusing in this context. The O'Reilly "UML 2 in a Nutshell" book gives more focus to it as a general modelling language (though I've only read the old 1998 one on UML 1.1).

Only basic notation was discussed (associations, composition, subclasses, association classes, dependencies), and this didn't go into the detail of class properties as attributes (cf. as associations) and operations which are more useful at the software design level.