Optimal preventive maintenance policy for leased equipment using failure rate reduction

This study proposes a maintenance scheme for leased equipment using failure rate reduction method and derives an optimal preventive maintenance (PM) policy that minimizes expected total cost. Under the proposed maintenance scheme, the lessor (equipment owner) rectifies failures with minimal repairs within the lease period, and the lessor may incur a penalty when repair time exceeds a time limit as specified in the lease contract. To reduce the expected total cost, the lessor may employ PM actions to decrease the number of possible failures. In this study, an efficient algorithm is developed to derive the optimal PM policy and a closed-form solution is obtained for the case where the lifetime distribution of the equipment is Weibull. The expected total cost using the optimal PM policy under the proposed maintenance scheme is then compared with the performance of other policies under various maintenance schemes through numerical examples.