ABSTRACTGames and simulations frequently model scenarios where obstacles move, appear, and disappear in an environment. A city environment changes as new buildings and roads are constructed, and routes can become partially blocked by small obstacles many times in a typical day. This paper studies the effect of usinglocalupdates to repair only the affected regions of a navigation mesh in response to a change in the environment. The techniques are inspired by incremental methods for Voronoi diagrams. The main novelty of this paper is that we show how to maintain a 2D or 2.5Dnavigation meshin an environment that contains dynamic polygonal obstacles. Experiments show that local updates are fast enough to permit real‐time updates of the navigation mesh. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.