The production system is a problem-solving methodology that is modeled after a system described by Post in 1943. This model has the following characteristics:
What are the conditions and the actions of a Rule:
Typical Rules usually are a set of condition-action pairs of the form:
Note that there is no necessary restriction on the number of conditions or actions
Just what a condition and action is specifically we will have to investigate
Said another way: RBS consist of:
The control strategy searches through the space of rules from a given initial state, applies valid rule(s) until it reaches the final state.
(an aside: production systems demonstrate the data-drived nature of intelligence (new input/behavior change). Rules can easily be added (systems are never complete))
Forward Chaining is one control strategy commonly used in Production
Systems and has the following characteristics
Backward Chaining is another common control strategy used in Production Systems. It has the following characteristics:
AI-depot tutorial (also has getting rules from decision trees)
aigamedev.com has a tutorial on rule-based systems too (with game info)

gifs from AI-depot tutorial

gifs from AI-depot tutorial Rules continued
Laird worked with Newell (of the General Problem Solver (GPS) fame) in making SOAR in the early 80's. About this time rules were really big
but people were wanting more control over which rules were chosen. The idea of meta-rules (late 70's) became prominent.
Soar used the basics of
rule-based systems but wanted more intelligent control. They established the concept of chunking (inspired by Miller's Magic Number 7) as a learning mechanism that acquires rules
from goal-based experience. Soar is a general problem-solving architecture with a rule-based memory that can acquire search-control knowledge
(strategy acquisition) and operator implementation rules. Soar has evolved over the past 20 years and is still alive and continues to grow using continued modern approaches (e.g., episodic memory and parallelism).
See a comparison between
Soar and rule-based systems