The idea was first described by the video game industry, which had a need for planning in large maps with a low amount of CPU time. The concept of using abstraction and heuristics is older and was first mentioned under the name ABSTRIPS (Abstraction-Based STRIPS) which was used to efficiently search the state spaces of logic games. A similar technique are navigation meshes (navmesh), which are used for geometrical planning in games and multimodal transportation planning which is utilized in travelling salesman problems with more than one transport vehicle.