Lease-Oriented Opportunistic Maintenance for Multi-Unit Leased Systems Under Product-Service Paradigm

Abstract

With many industries increasingly relying on leased equipment and machinery, many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are turning to product-service packages where they deliver (typically lease) the physical assets. An integrated service contract will be offered for the asset. A classic example being Rolls Royce power-by-the-hour aircraft engines. Service contracts offered by original equipment manufacturers have predominantly focused on maintenance and upkeep activities for a single asset. Interestingly enough, manufacturing industries are beginning to adopt the product-service paradigm. However, one of the unique aspects in manufacturing settings is that the leased system is often not a single asset but instead a multi-unit system (e.g., an entire production line). In this paper, we develop a lease-oriented maintenance methodology for multi-unit leased systems under product-service paradigm. Unlike traditional maintenance models, we propose a leasing profit optimization (LPO) policy to adaptively compute optimal preventive maintenance (PM) schedules that capture the following dynamics: (1) the structural dependencies of the multi-unit system, (2) opportunistic maintenance of multiple system components, and (3) leasing profit savings (LPSs). We demonstrate the performance of our multi-unit maintenance policy by using a leased automotive manufacturing line and investigate its impact on leasing profits.