I have a small AI framework for a shooting based game. Although this is rarely needed, as when agents are close to each other they are usually fighting, I would none the less like some way of implementing avoidance behaviour.

For example, if in the future I wanted to take away their weapons and have many of them wonder around in a crowd, how would I make them not hit / pass through each other, but instead avoid each other?

two ideas I had would be to add steering behaviour and allow that to deviate from their path, or to use a dynamic pathfinding technique. Are there better ways? What is the more respected practice?