Thanks for the alternative name! Helps further research the technique. The core idea is relatively simple so I'm not surprised these are known. But finding a name of something you know is not easy with just a search engine.
Sure thing! And as I mentioned in another comment, if you google for "potential fields" and "flow fields" in games, there's a whole bunch of papers and talks on this.
Interesting, because these kinds of potential fields are similar to the "predictive map" representations we see in the firing rates of hippocampal cells.
Now that you mentioned "flow field", I remember seeing it in a Supreme Commander AI demonstration technique. Two columns of tanks can navigate through each other seamlessly, without chaos. And in realtime. Imagine seeing this in the days of Warcraft 1, where it was common for a unit to use left hand rule across the entire map because the bridge was momentarily occupied.