Integration of the Vimos Control System

The VIRMOS consortium of French and Italian Institutes (PI: O. Le Fèvre, co-PI: G. Vettolani) is manufacturing two wide field imaging multi-object spectrographs for the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope (VLT), with emphasis on the ability to carry over spectroscopic surveys of large numbers of sources: the VIsible Multi-Object Spectrograph, VIMOS, and the Near InfraRed MultiObject Spectrograph, NIRMOS. VIMOS is being installed at the Nasmyth focus of the third Unit Telescope of the VLT at Mount Paranal in Chile, after a period of pre-integration in Europe at the Observatoire de Haute Provence. There are 52 motors to be controlled in parallel in the spectrograph, making VIMOS a complex machine to be handled. This paper will focus on the description of the control system, designed in the ESO VLT standard control concepts, and on some integration issues and problem solving strategies.