Stanford Heuristic Programming Project February 1977

A consultation program plays the role of an expert consultant in some domain, giving advice or answers to non-experts with problems In the domain. Users will often want to know how the system arrived at its results during a particular consultation. This paper explains how the implementation of such a program as a production system can facilitate program-generated explanations. A production system [2] consists of three basic components: a set of production rules, a data base which is both used and updated by these rules, and a rule interpreter. A production rule often is in the form of a situation-action rule: it describes a situation and a set of actions to be taken if this situation is found to exist.