The integration of reusable software components

The term integration is used very often now in many different disciplines including software and systems engineering. Unfortunately, a sufficiently precise definition that would clearly express the meaning of the term in a formal way as it would be necessary for it to become an engineering term does not yet exist. In fact, it is very obvious that the term is used with different interpretations and is thus now more a cause for misunderstanding than for engineering precision. It is the intention of this article to develop a more formal definition that can describe the embedding of prefabricated software components into a new systems environment.