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.

As a system complexity increases and technology innovation progresses rapidly, it tends to lease a system rather than own one. This paper deals with a decision-making model to determine the preventive maintenance strategy for leased equipment. Various maintenance options are presented and formulated via the non-homogeneous Poisson process. During the lease period, the preventive maintenance strategy that minimizes the total cost among the presented maintenance options is selected. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the proposed model.