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To meet the dynamically changing market requirements, production enterprises are collaborating in the form of production chains to share life cycle engineering data/knowledge as well as to improve production efficiency and product quality. This paper proposes a model-based control mechanism and intelligent control layer, which is used to control the operation of chained production enterprises. The control mechanism is achieved by defining control levels as mapped to production chain topology using the concept of operation isolation area. Production constraints and control rules are defined as attached to structure elements. The proposed control layer is used to decide the suitable operation of the selected production chain, in view of process constraints and operating conditions. A case study of a generic production chain with recycling is used to show the proposed control mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]