PROFIT IN A 2-UNIT STANDBY SYSTEM WITH A GENERAL COST STRUCTURE.

A 2-unit cold standby redundant system with exponential failure time and general repair time distribution is considered. A quantity of great relevance in the maintenance of equipments in modern business and industrial systems, viz. , profit that the system will earn per unit time, has been obtained analytically under undiscounted and discounted cost structure by superimposing R. A. Howard's reward structure on the semi-Markov generated by the system. Steady-state profit has also been studied for its behavior for a special case.