Heuristic is a function which is used in Informed Search, and it finds the most promising path. It takes the current state of the agent as its input and produces the estimation of how close agent is from the goal. The heuristic method, however, might not always give the best solution, but it guaranteed to find a good solution in reasonable time. Heuristic function estimates how close a state is to the goal. It is represented by h(n), and it calculates the cost of an optimal path between the pair of states. The value of the heuristic function is always positive.

h(n) <= h*(n)  
Here h(n) is heuristic cost, and h*(n) is the estimated cost. Hence heuristic cost should be less than or equal to the estimated cost.