Path planning is a fundamental problem, especially for various AEC applications, such as architecturaldesign, indoor and outdoor navigation, and emergency evacuation. However, the conventionalapproaches mainly operate path planning on 2D drawings or building layouts by simply considering geometricinformation, while losing abundant semantic information of building components. To address thisissue, this paper introduces a new method to cope with path planning for 3D indoor space through an IFC(Industry Foundation Classes) file as input. As a major data exchange standard for Building InformationModeling (BIM), the IFC standard is capable of restoring both geometric information and rich semanticinformation of building components to support lifecycle data sharing. The method consists of three mainsteps: (1) extracting both geometric and semantic information of building components defined withinthe IFC file, (2) discretizing and mapping the extracted information into a planar grid, (3) and finally findingthe shortest path based on the mapping for path planning using Fast Marching Method. The paperaims to process different kinds of building components and their corresponding properties to obtain richsemantic information that can enhance applications of path planning. In addition, the IFC-based distributeddata sharing and management is implemented for path planning. The paper also presents someexperiments to demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency and adaptability of the method. Video demonstrationis available from http://cgcad.thss.tsinghua.edu.cn/liuyushen/ifcpath/.