Inadequate maintenance decisions lead to incremental overall costs. In order to minimize costs in maintenance of the multi-state repairable system, we model a preventive maintenance (PM) scheme of the multistate repairable system using non-Markov process. The periodically decreasing reliability model of the non-Markov dynamic system with dynamic transition probabilities is established to satisfy the probability change. The diesel engine system is taken as an example to illustrate the model. The reliability of the diesel engine is analyzed and its PM scheme is worked out. RENO software is used to simulate the diesel engine system. The maintenance cost of components and the optimal PM interval data of the system are obtained by using the minimal average cost as the objective function. The adaptability of PM is judged, and the optimal PM scheme is presented. © 2016, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.