The agent metaphor has shown its usefulness for modelling as well as implementing complex and dynamic applications. Although a number of agent applications has been successfully realised and used, it must be stated that the distribution of commercial off-the-shelf applications is very scarce. For this discontenting situation, at least two reasons can be identified. On the one hand, the development of agent-based applications is difficult suffering from insufficient standards and tools and on the other hand deployment issues are little researched and supported. In this paper, several deployment-related topics are discussed and a vision for the deployment of distributed multi-agent systems is conceived. From the vision, requirements for launching and configuring agent applications are derived. According to these requirements, a platform independent reference model of the proposed deployment infrastructure is presented. The reference model provides the basis for the development of our...