Designing and maintaining a distributed system requires consideration of dependencies and invariants in the system’s model. This paper suggests expressing distribution decisions in the system model based on the system’s context. Hence, UML is enriched by two new speci- fication techniques for planning distribution: On the one hand, ‘Context properties’ describe dependencies on the design level between otherwise possibly unrelated model elements, which share the same context. On the other hand, ‘context-based distribution instructions’ specify distri- bution decisions based on context properties. The distribution language ‘ConDIL’ combines both techniques. It consists of four layers introduced informally via examples taken from a case study.