Abstract The ongoing 4th industrial revolution is affecting all aspects of traditional industries, including technical and organisational issues. In this context, there is a wide variety of European manufacturing initiatives addressing the challenges related to the implementation of the 4th industrial revolution principles and ideas, including digitalization and Zero-Defects Manufacturing (ZDM). Besides technical and organisational issues, standardization, in the context of next generation manufacturing systems, is a topic requiring better study. In this article we offer an analysis of relevant standards for manufacturing systems which was performed for the Digital Manufacturing Platforms (4DMP) cluster in order to identify those standards that might be relevant for ZDM, as well as for further projects or manufacturing platform designers. The standards covered by this work are aligned with the RAMI 4.0 reference model in order to simplify the design process by interlinking standards with relevant model layers and thus contribute to system's interoperability.