As a system complexity increases and technology innovation progresses rapidly, leasing the equipment is considered as an important issue in many engineering areas. In practice, many engineering fields lease the equipment because it is an economical way to lease the equipment rather than to own the equipment. In addition, as the maintenance actions for the equipment are costly and need a specialist, the lessor is responsible for the maintenance actions in most leased contract. Hence, the lessor should establish the optimal maintenance strategy to minimize the maintenance cost. This paper proposes two periodic preventive maintenance policies for the leased equipment. The preventive maintenance action of policy 1 is performed with a periodic interval, in which their intervals are the same until the end of lease period. The other policy is to determine the periodic preventive maintenance interval minimizing total maintenance cost during the lease period. In addition, this paper presents two decision-making models to determine the preventive maintenance strategy for leased equipment based on the lessor’s preference between the maintenance cost and the reliability at the end of lease period. The structural properties of the proposed decision-making model are investigated and algorithms to search the optimal maintenance policy that are satisfied by the lessor are provided. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the proposed model. The results show that a maintenance policy minimizing the maintenance cost is selected as a reasonable decision as the lease term becomes shorter. Moreover, the frequent preventive maintenance actions are performed when the minimal repair cost is higher than the preventive maintenance cost, resulting in higher maintenance cost.

The rapid growth of engineering technology and the emergence of systemized and large-scale engineering systems have resulted in complexity and uncertainty throughout the lifecycle activities of engineering systems. This complex and large-scale engineering system consists of numerous components, but system failure can be caused by failure of any one of a number of components. There is a real difficulty in managing such a complex and large-scale system as a part. In order to efficiently manage the system and have high reliability, it is necessary to structure a system with a complex structure as a sub-system. Also, in the case of a system in which cause of failures exist at the same time, it is required to identify the correlation of the components lifetime and utilize it for the design policy or maintenance activities of the system. Competitive risk theory has been used as a theory based on this concept. In this study, we apply the competitive risk theory to the models with combined structure of series and parallel which is the basic structure of most complex engineering systems. We construct a competing risks model and propose a mathematical model of net lifetime and crude lifetime for each cause of failure, assuming that the components consisting a parallel system are mutually dependent. In addition, based on the constructed model, the correlation of cause of failure is mathematically analyzed and the hazard function is derived by dividing into net lifetime and crude lifetime.