Based on this decoupling, it is possible to describe the integration-relevant aspects of a business process at an abstract level first – irrespective of the details of a particular system landscape. We call the corresponding phase of an integration project the design time. At design time, those parts of a business process can be specified that are independent from any technical details which are implementation-relevant or system landscape-relevant. We have already introduced the integration scenario as a high-level description of the integration at design time and we will continue to use this term in the following discussion. In a later phase – at configuration time – the integration scenario will be configured to run in a specific system landscape. You can consider one and the same integration scenario to be deployed on completely different system landscapes. For example, in one case there is a material management integration scenario that spans only few systems within a midsize company, whereas in another case the same integration scenario spans several hundreds of systems located in the different departments of a large enterprise. The same scenario in this case involves the execution of the same business logic - just on a completely different scale. The scenario is finally executed at runtime and can be monitored by an administrator. The following figure illustrates the relationship of the design time and configuration time view
Figure 3: Integration scenario (design time view; left) and assignment of process components to systems of the actual system landscape (configuration time view; right) As an example, the figure shows the systems of the actual system landscape where the business logic of process components 1 and 2 is implemented: Process component 1 is deployed on systems 1a and 1b, whereas process component 2 is deployed on systems 2a, 2b, and 2c. Resulting from this, the communication between two process components is broken down to communication between the systems mentioned above at runtime, whereas the communication is mediated by an integration broker. The three phases introduced here can be considered to be phases of an integration project: They form the basic framework for the detailed description of the concepts in this handbook
