Generally, to get the minimum distance between two arbitrary shapes that are composed of circular arcs and lines, we must calculate distances for all the possible pairs of the components from two given shapes. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for the minimum distance problem between two shapes by using their structural features after extracting the reduced component lists which are essential to calculate the minimum distance considering the relationship of shape location. Even though the reduced component lists may contain all the components of the shapes in the worst case, in the average we can reduce the required computation much by using the reduced component lists. This method may be efectively applied to calculating the minimum distance between two shapes which are generated by the CAD tool, like in the nesting system.