Don't Leave Your Plan on the Shelf.

In 1970s, an artificial intelligence (AI) system based on well-founded concepts that could generate plans was developed for an automated robot. Researchers in those days have been engaged in exploring some common requirements for automated programming, natural language understanding, constraint handling, and robot planning. The period of the 1970s established that some fundamental problems of plan representation and reasoning had to be addressed for progress to be made in this domain. The era was succeeded by a weird gap in the research, and scientists are now once again returning back to the same research domain. The article exposes that this gap had been driven by certain factors, which form the focus of the article. Factors underlined comprehend to facts like planning in general is difficult, and toy problems and puzzles have proved to be erroneous starting point for problem solving. AI community had not recognized the power of using knowledge for tasks like analysis, interpretation and diagnosis. This points towards a better formulation and understanding of the nature of AI plans.