  Industry 4.0 revolution concerns the digital transformation of manufacturing
and promises to answer the ever-increasing demand of product customisation and
manufacturing flexibility while incurring low costs. To perform the required
factory reconfiguration, a computationally demanding optimisation process has
to be executed to find favourable solutions in a relatively short time. While
previous research focused on planning and scheduling of smart factories based
on cloud-based optimisation, little attention has been paid to effective
approaches to describe the targeted factory, the required products and the
production processes. However, these matters are fundamental for the
optimisation engine to be correctly and efficiently performed. This paper
presents an XML-based factory modelling language to effectively describe the
above data for a given factory and commodity order and to provide a convenient
interface for altering the input information. Finally, two real-world
manufacturing plants are provided to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed
description language.
