Updated on July 13, 2008.
Automated Planning: Theory and Practice took more than four years to write. Here’s a rough timeline:
In Fall 1999, I taught a graduate-level course on AI planning. Feeling frustrated at the lack of a comprehensive textbook, I decided to try to write one. I contacted Morgan Kaufmann Publishers in March 2000 and they put me in touch with Denise Penrose, who ultimately became the editor for the book.
By the spring of 2000 I had written several chapters, but decided I couldn’t write the book alone: my knowledge of the field wasn’t comprehensive enough. I needed a co-author whose knowledge complemented mine. So during a visit to Paolo Traverso in Trento in May 2000, I asked him to co-author the book with me, and he agreed.
During the next few months, neither Paolo nor I managed to do much work on the book. But at a meeting in Cypress where we both were giving lectures, we invited Malik Ghallab, who also was giving lectures there, to be an additional co-author. He accepted the offer.
When Malik agreed to co-author the book with us, he said he couldn’t start working on it until the spring of 2001. At first I worried that this might delay the book further, but this worry turned out to be needless. When we met in Toulouse in March 2001 to start work on the book, it became clear that Malik’s organizational skills would be a great asset for making progress on the book.
During the next several years, we coordinated our work by means of email, cvs file sharing, and frequent teleconferences. We also continued having face-to-face meetings every few months; these were useful for reading and critiquing each other’s work, revising the outline and schedule, and setting dates for delivering chapters to Denise. The next two of these meetings were in November 2001 in Trento, and March 2002 in College Park.
Our fourth meeting to work on the book was in 
April 2002 in Toulouse, just before the AIPS-2002 conference. During this meeting, we agreed to a deadline of June 2003 for finishing the first draft of the book. But our ideas of how much material we could write by that deadline were, we discovered later, wildly over-optimistic.
Our fifth “book meeting” was 
August, 2002 in Trento. The photo shows Paolo and Malik working on the book. At this meeting, we also taught a course at ESSLLI-2002 based on what we had written so far. It was becoming clear that we wouldn’t be able to write all of the remaining chapters by the June 30 deadline–so in the interests of getting the book done, we decided to omit several of them. We relegated the topics of those chapters to sections of the last chapter of the book.
Our sixth meeting was in Trento in June 2003, just before the ICAPS conference, to finish the first draft of the book. The photo shows Paolo, Malik, and me holding copies of the just-completed draft. We revised the draft that summer, and delivered the final draft to Denise in October. In December, Simon (the production manager) sent us the copy-edited manuscript, and we made changes based on the copy-editor’s comments. In January 2004, Simon sent us the page proofs, and we made some additional changes.
To develop the design for the front cover of the book, Denise talked with us about what characteristics we might like to convey. A few months later, she emailed us copies of several paintings that had been selected with those characteristics in mind, and we selected two or three that we liked. A graphic artist developed mock-ups of book covers incorporating these paintings, we decided upon a modified version of one of them, and the design was finalized in March 2004. The painting is a reproduction of Le grand remorqueur (The large tugboat), painted by Fernand Léger in 1923. The original is at the Musée national Fernand Léger.
In May 2004, the book finally appeared in print. Due to a mixup at the warehouse, the publisher sent us copies of the wrong book; thus some of the customers who had ordered the book saw it before we did!
The next time we met was at the June 2004 ICAPS conference in Whistler, British Columbia. Denise had a booth at the first day of the conference, and we had a book-signing event. Denise sold every copy of the book that she had brought with her, and the photo shows the purchaser of the last copy.
I’m very proud of the book, and of the stature it has achieved in the AI planning research community. I’m also embarrassed by some of the book’s flaws. A few years ago Malik and Paolo and I discussed writing a second edition, but I doubt it will happen: each of us has subsequently taken on too many other responsibilities.