One of the paradigms of Industry 4.0 is the quick answer of companies over changes on customer’s necessities. This can only be achieved when an efficient vertical and horizontal integration occurs across manufacturing systems. However, thousands of heterogeneous information must be exchanged across the process and semantic interoperability obstacles are identified for an effective communication. This research aims to identify the main bibliographical references that deal with horizontal and vertical integration to support a semantic interoperable manufacturing system. Also, it is proposed a preliminary approach to support a semantic interoperable horizontal and vertical integration across Smart Manufacturing Systems. A total of 732 articles were found and applying exclusion criteria the number went down to 31. A classification based on the subjects that each article contained was applied resulting in seven main works for the research themes. According to the analysis of the main works, the preliminary architecture was proposed using the semantic web approach and the formal rules. Although this research does not evaluate the performance of the solution proposed, it was evident that this field has new perspectives on future research opportunities to cope with the semantic information interoperability in multiple integration levels of manufacturing systems.

Global competitiveness challenges manufacturing industry to rationalise different ways of bringing to the market new products in a short lead-time with competitive prices whilst ensuring higher quality levels and customisation. Industries need to effectively share heterogeneous information during Product Development Process (PDP) within and across their institutional boundaries to be competitive. However, problems with misinterpretation and mistakes have been identified during information exchange due to the semantic interoperability obstacles. Thus, this research proposes a systematic literature review to identify the main researches and the milestones reference works on semantic interoperability field. A rigorous methodology was conducted in different databases, covering the articles published in scientific journals from 2005 to 2015 as a preliminary study had indicated that the incidence of articles related to the subject was more frequent from the second half of the 2000s. The research structure consisted of four steps: Survey – searching, analysis and selection of recent researches; Categorisation – categorisation of the selected papers; References citation frequency analysis – the selected papers were analysed and the main researches and milestones references were identified; and Main researches critical analysis – the main researches were analysed for their contributions and limitations, their contributions and limitations, resulting in 14 selected scientific articles and 8 identified milestones references. It is evident that this field has interesting perspectives on future research opportunities on semantic interoperability of information issues across PDP, contributing to the new concepts of future factories.