Fast changing markets and higher demands for higher flexibility in the process industry in general, require modular concepts that decrease the necessary time-to-market. This requires process simulation in earlier engineering phases and make virtual commissioning of the modular process plants besides conventional commissioning essential. Quality constraints of the model for virtual commissioning also have to be considered to confidently trust the results and findings during virtual commissioning. A particular hard problem is the quality assurance of the third-party simulation models. Our currently investigated research hypothesis is that the VC application puts an emphasis on the factors efficiency, maintainability and compatibility as defined in the quality model approach for software quality assessment for a mapping towards process simulation. This paper addresses the necessary requirements for the quality assessment of simulation models for the purpose of virtual commissioning and presents factors, criteria and metrics for the assessment of virtual commissioning models. This paper extends the current framework for functional quality assessment of simulation models in smart equipment to the use case of virtual commissioning models and is a first step to the automated quality assessment for virtual commissioning models. Further, the need for model certification is discussed.