ABB announced that the S100 I/O products are no longer a active product and that customers should consider their upgrade route.

Although the S100 is part of the AC400 product and the controller upgrade route is the AC800M in either the DCS 800xA solution or AC800M in the compact products solution. The compact solution is a SCADA (800HMI) and PLC (AC800M).

These are complete projects which require a major upgrade requiring rewriting software in CoDeSys instead of AMPL, redesigning the hardware arrangement, Factory Acceptance Testing, changing the process connections to S800, and full commissioning. These processes that these systems control are very often in 24hr operation and downtime is limited sometimes only a few days per year. Some of these process which have refractory areas may not allow prolonged down periods. Such complete project upgrades can take considerable commissioning time.

To reduce risk and downtime the S100 I/O can be replaced with S800 I/O on a AF100 fieldbus as the first stage of the upgrade. The second stage would be the controller upgrade to AC800M with the respective 800xA licensing this does need a full commissioning.

Although the AF100 would not be employed for further upgrading, The I/O headers and clusters can be adapted to Profibus to suit the AC800M route.

General Procedure

• Source code dumps and dimension information to be taken from control system and modify for new I/O
• Prepare a I/O check-sheet to check before and after connections
• Design and build the AF100 strings and S800 modules this could be built into new cubicles with the cabling going from the new to existing cubicles, or fit the S800 module clusters on the original swing frames.
• Load up modified application
• Swap termination units and fit new cubicle Adjust objects on 800xA
• Commission