This thesis belongs to the domain of formal methods. We focus their application on a specific methodology for the development of software: component-based engineering.The Grid Component Model (GCM) endorses this approach by providing all the means to define, compose and dynamically reconfigure component-based distributed applications. In this thesis we address the formal specification, verification and deployment of distributed and reconfigurable GCM applications. Our first contribution is an industrial case study on the behavioural specification and verification of a reconfigurable distributed application: The HyperManager. Our second contribution is a framework, developed with the Coq proof assistant, for reasoning on software architectures: Mefresa. This encompasses the mechanization of the GCM specification, and the means to reason about reconfigurable GCM architectures. Further, we address behavioural concerns by formalizing a semantics based on execution traces of synchronized transition systems. Overall, it provides the first steps towards a complete specification and verification platform addressing both architectural and behavioural properties. Finally, our third contribution is a new Architecture Description Language (ADL), denominated Painless. Further, we discuss its proof-of-concept integration with ProActive, a Java middleware for concurrent and distributed programming, and the de facto reference implementation of the GCM.