The increasing complexity of distributed embedded systems, as found today in airplanes or cars, becomes more and more a critical cost-factor for their development. Model-based approaches have recently demonstrated their potential for both improving and accelerating (software) development processes. Therefore, in the project DECOS 1 , which aims at improving system architectures and development of distributed safetycritical embedded systems, an integrated, model-driven tool-chain is established, accompanying the system development process from design to deployment. This paper gives an overview of this tool-chain and outlines important design decisions and features.