Rule Based Expert Systems: The Mycin Experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project (The Addison-Wesley series in artificial intelligence)

In the old old old old expert systems days they used to say forward chaining was good for looking around (checking for what could be) while backward chaining was good for confirming (checking if "it" really is).

Think configuration (forward chaining, XCON [1]) and medical diagnosis (MYCIN) [2]

1. http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1980/AAAI80-076.pdf
2. https://www.amazon.com/Rule-Based-Expert-Systems-Addison-Wesley/dp/0201101726