Dear All,

Does anybody knows if Siemens announced that the life of using the profibus protocol is almost soon??, as a standard protocol communication for their products ??

Whats the reasons and till when must be still runnning for new CPUs??

Thank you,

Regards,

Heĺlo Arthur;

Siemens is a huge conglomerate,  and predicting how their offerings in a very small part of their markets will evolve is very difficult. Especially if like us you are looking in from the outside.

What is known about Siemens and Profibus: Siemens contributed to the development of Profibus standards and equipment (as defined butthe German government), and implemented an early version, known as Sinec L2, with their S5 PLCs. When Profibus was launched officially, Siemens became one of their early sponsors, introducing it as the main distributed I/O network for their S7-300 and S7- 400 PLCs upon their inauguration.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PROFIBUS

Protocol Information

PROFIBUS (Process Field Bus) is a standard for fieldbus communication in automation technology and was first promoted in 1989 by BMBF (German department of education and research) and then used by Siemens. It should not be confused with the PROFINET standard for Industrial Ethernet.PROFIBUS is openly published as part of IEC 61158.

https://new.siemens.com/global/en/products/automation/industrial-communication/profibus.html

With the introduction of the newer S7-1200 and S7-1500 models, the emphasis is being placed on Profinet for distributed stations. But Profibus is always offered as an option using extra CPs, probably due to the high number of installed Orofibus nodes in industry and machinery.

Siemens has a history of maintaining support for existing equipment over a long period, even at it ceases to be manufactured. And the market shows no sign of abandoning Profibus for IOs, drives, PLC networking...So I do not think you will have to worry anytime soon about losing access to Profibus on your Siemens controllers.

Just my 2 cents...

Hope this helps,

Daniel Chartier 

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for take some time to answer my concern question, very good explanation by the way.... somehow make sense to me, However some customers for sure are worry (wrong information) about to invest in new technology that make them obsolete in a short period of time (even 5-10 years). They want to to invest in infrastructure that still support for several years in market,

It helps me a lot,

kind regards

Arturo Gómez

Hello Arturo;

In Siemens' world, a likely replacement for Profibus appears to be Profinet. As stated before, the S7-1200 and S7-1500 CPUs come with an integrated Profinet port, with Profibus CMs and CPs optional.

However, even in the case that Profibus would disappear form the offerings of Siemens' controllers, Siemens offers already a number of gateways from Ethernet to Profibus, such as the IE/PB link, and the IWAN/PB link, that will always make the existing Profibus architectures controllable from a Profinet CPU. 

Sounds like your clients are listening to the siren song of vendors from competing manufacturers, often spreading nervousness about another vendor's offerings. If they cannot scare you about the network strengths and qualities, they will sow doubt bout its support and longevity. I have seen that many times, even from Siemens reps. It's the way their game is played. If you feel you have to enter their discussions, ask them to evaluate the cost of replacing the existing networks and plant equipment controlled with Profibus at this time, generally that calms them down for a while...

Hope this helps,

Daniel Chartier