The development and maintenance of the control systems of the four Large Hadron Collider(LHC) experiments will require a non-negligible amount of resources and effort.In order to minimise the overall effort required the Joint Controls Project(JCOP) was set-up as a collaboration between CERN and the four LHC experiments to find and implement common solutions for the control of the LHC experiments.It is one of the few examples of such a wide collaboration and therefore the existence of the JCOP project is extremely significant.This paper will give a brief overview of the project,its structure and its history.It will go on to summarise the various sub-projects that have been initiated under the auspices of JCOP together with their current status.It will highlight that the JCOP general principle is to promote the use of industrial solutions wherever possible.However,this does not rule out the provision of custom sulutions when non-standard devices or very large numbers of devices have to be controlled.The paper will also discuss the architecture foreseen by JCOP and where in this architecture the various types of solutions are expected to be used.Finally,althouth the selection of common industrial and custom solutions is a necessary condition ofr JCOP to succeed,the use of these solutions in themselves would not necessarily lead to the production of homogeneous control systems, Therefore,the paper will finish with a description of the JCOP Framework,which is being developed to promote the use of these common solutions,toi reduce the development effort required by the various experiment development teams and to help to build and integrate control systems which can be more easily maintained.
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