contact pairs

Hello,

I want to know that is there a novel way of defining several two dimensional contact pairs in Abaqus/Explicit. I know that abaqus has the capability of defining a general contact but it is restricted only to Abaqus standard and 3D Abaqus explicit problems. 

I have a 2D plane strain problem where I have to specify more than 1000 contact pairs in the assembly between similar instances of the same part. Is there a fortran subroutine that could be used to determine so many contact pairs?

Thanks,

Tuhin