The combination of the unit operations reaction and separation in one apparatus, the reactive distillation column, shows enormous advantages for some reaction systems and is disastrous for others. The goal of this thesis is to identify criteria to decide whether reactive distillation is favorable or not for certain classes of reaction systems. First, focus is on ideal binary and ternary systems as principle mechanisms and phenomena can be examined and explained for these systems - which is not possible for real-world problems with a mess of physical properties, fittings to experimental data and so forth.First the basics are reviewed that are necessary for a proper process design. On the one hand these are concepts like residue curve maps, reactive or kinetic azeotropes, distillation boundaries, kinetically or equilibrium controlled reactions, etc. On the other hand basic properties of mathematical modeling and optimization are briefly summarized.