Calling in-app mule flow from java code

We are trying to use free jars of mule and host it in a standalone java web application (hosted on an in-house tomcat server). The web-application has some web-pages, apis. In one api call, we would like to call a mule flow with passed values. We are able to host the mule flow as a war, but when we try to package them with the existing web-app, we can not find how to call it. Sample simple flow is like this -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <mule xmlns="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core" xmlns:doc="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/documentation"
    	xmlns:spring="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" 
    	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    	xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-current.xsd
    http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core/current/mule.xsd">
        <flow name="SampleFlow">
            <logger message="===============Logging from Mule Flow =================== # [payload]" level="INFO" doc:name="Logger"/>
        </flow>
    </mule>

And we want to call this `SampleFlow` inside a java method so that when `executeFlow()` is called, the `logger` component prints the message with the given `inputValue` as a payload. What we were trying is like this -

import org.mule.api.MuleContext;

import org.mule.api.MuleException;

import org.mule.api.config.ConfigurationException;

import org.mule.api.lifecycle.InitialisationException;

import org.mule.config.spring.SpringXmlConfigurationBuilder;

import org.mule.context.DefaultMuleContextFactory;

public class ......

{

.....

public executeFlow(String inputValue)

{

String wsStatus = "Received";

....

DefaultMuleContextFactory muleContextFactory = new DefaultMuleContextFactory();

SpringXmlConfigurationBuilder configBuilder;

MuleContext muleContext = null;

try {

configBuilder = new SpringXmlConfigurationBuilder("SampleFlow.xml");

muleContext = muleContextFactory.createMuleContext(configBuilder);

muleContext.start();

[Something would be here to call SampleFlow]

} catch (InitialisationException | ConfigurationException e) {

// TODO Auto-generated catch block

e.printStackTrace();

} catch (MuleException e) {

// TODO Auto-generated catch block

e.printStackTrace();

}

}

}

We do put the following lines in the `web.xml`.

<context-param>

<param-name>org.mule.config</param-name>

<param-value>http_test.xml</param-value>

</context-param>

<listener>

<listener-class>org.mule.config.builders.MuleXmlBuilderContextListener</listener-class>

</listener>