A renewal-reward process consists of i.i.d. regenerative cycles , where is the th cycle length and is the reward accumulated during that cycle. If and , the renewal-reward theorem states that the cumulative reward satisfies
almost surely, with the usual negligible-remainder condition for an unfinished cycle.
For the machine, let be its working lifetime after a repair. The next repair occurs at the first inspection following failure, so one repair-to-repair cycle has length
while its working-time reward is . Since an exponential distribution of rate has mean ,
By the tail-sum formula for the positive integer-valued variable ,
Therefore
and the long-run proportion of time for which the machine is working is