Efficient execution of UML state machines on a virtual machine

In the context of Model Driven Architecture (MDA), executable UML models are of growing importance in the software design process. In previous work, we introduced an approach on executable UML models based on a UML Virtual Machine for executing composite object-oriented models consisting of state-and control-oriented behavior parts. The state-oriented behavior is expressed using a subset of the UML State Machine syntax. As the resulting models are too complex to be executed directly, we describe in this paper how such State Machines can be represented using a simple model for an Executable State Machine and how the resulting models are represented and executed using our UML Virtual Machine.