The performance evaluation of manufacturing systems is a critical and difficult task to be addressed throughout the factory life-cycle phases, including the early design, detailed design, ramp-up, reconfiguration, and monitoring. An efficient and effective performance evaluation may have a relevant impact on the profitability of an industrial company. This paper addresses the application of a data model for virtual factories to the performance evaluation problem, aiming at exploiting the interoperability with other software tools to continuously update the virtual representation of a manufacturing system, so that accurate estimations can be obtained. A test case is described and then used to check the viability of the proposed approach in the case of Discrete Event Simulation (DES) based on a commercial software tool like Arena.