# Industrial Communications Overview

The industrial communications protocols (also known as factory floor protocols) supported by VisionPro and Cognex Designer allow you to create an application that can communicate with a compatible Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) across an industrial network.

VisionPro and Designer support the following protocols:

- PROFINET (Siemens PLCs): PROFINET PLC Configuration
- EtherNet/IP (Rockwell PLCs): EtherNet/IP PLC Configuration
- SLMP (Mitsubishi PLCs): SLMP PLC Setup

The Cognex implementation of the factory floor protocols is based on the Cognex Network Data Model (NDM), a protocol-independent abstraction that allows your application to work with any supported protocol without any modifications.