Executable UML

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was created as a confluence of three well-known modeling methodology. It has gained wide popularity and has become a de facto standard when it comes to visual modeling of software systems. It is taught in agreat number of school and has been used by a great number firms of industry.
Despite its popularity and the heavy investment that has been made in UML tools and expertise, the UML is not yet readily translatable into running code. Some of the problems that have been identified with the language include a lack of a action semantics language and its sheer size.
Some renowned software methodologists have set out to sort the problems that prevent UML from being readily executable. They have created a dialect of UML that leaves away some of UML's unnecessary features and added action semantics. Those methodologists hope that this sub-language will be at a higher level of abstraction, which would allow domain experts to take active part in the modeling of applications. This sub-language is called executable UML.
This research aims to study this new methodology. Some of the topics researched are: can executable UML raise the level of abstraction? Can it bring productivity gains? How about the tools for executable UML on the market? What are the possible shortcomings with the methodology?
In order to gain insights into the methodology and answer some of the questions posed above, we build a prototype of an existing system using the executable UML methodology.