Software deployment in large-scale and open distributed systems (such as ubiquitous systems, mobile systems and P2P systems) is still an open issue. These environments are distributed, heterogeneous and can be naturally unstable (fitted with a dynamic network topology). Deployment in such environments require the management of a large number of hosts, network links and deployment constraints. Existing distributed deployment solutions are usable only within static and reliable topologies of hosts, where a man in charge of the deployment has to describe more or less manually the topology. Moreover, majority of these tools do not take into account network and computer QoS variabilities, hosts crashes, network link failures and network topology changes, which characterize open and mobile environments. In this thesis, we discuss the motivations for an autonomic software deployment and the requirements underlying for such a platform. We carefully study and compare the existing work about software deployment. Then, we propose a middleware framework, designed to reduce the human cost for setting up software deployment and to deal with failure-prone and change-prone environments. We also propose an autonomic deployment process in three steps : deployment constraints description step, constraints resolution step and the autonomic deployment step. For the first step, we defined a high-level constraint-based dedicated language (DSL) as support for expressing deployment constraints. In the second step, we have designed a distributed infrastructure to collect target hosts properties used to solve deployment constraints. For the third step, we propose an agent-based system for establishing and maintaining software deployment. At last, we give an overview of our working prototype with some details on some experimental results
