than the existing policies.

In this paper, a new replacement policy is proposed for a

deteriorating repairable system with multiple vacations of one repairman. It is assumed that
the repair after failures is not ‘as good as new’ and the repairman is in multiple vacations. The
reaching of the effective age of the system is assumed to be mutually stochastic at working
state, waiting state for repair and being repaired state. Under these assumptions, a replacement
policy is considered based on the effective age T of the system. The long-run expected
downtime per unit time and the long-run expected profit per unit time as objective functions
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are chosen, respectively. By using geometric process theory and renewal process theory, the
mathematic models are established and the explicit expressions of objective functions are

derived. Then the optimal replacement policy T * can be determined to minimize the
expected downtime or maximize the expected profit.
This paper is structured as follows. The coming section introduces the geometric
processes. Section 3 puts forward the assumptions according to the optimal replacement
policy. Section 4 establishes the mathematic models and derives the explicit expressions of
the long-run expected downtime per unit time and the long-run expected profit per unit time,
respectively. Conclusion remarks are offered in the last section.

2. Definitions
This section introduces the definitions of geometric processes from Lam (1988b) firstly.

Definition 1. Assume ξ and η are two random variables. For any real number α , if

P{ξ ≥ α } > P{η ≥ α }

then ξ is called stochastically bigger than η , denote as ξ > st η . Similarly, if

P{ξ ≥ α }<P{η ≥ α }

then ξ is called stochastically smaller than η , denote as ξ < st η .

Definition 2. Assume that { X n , n = 1, 2,L} is a sequence of independent nonnegative

random variables. If the cumulative distribution function of X n is given by Fn (t ) = F ( a n −1t )

for n = 1, 2,L with a > 0 , { X n , n = 1, 2,L} is called a geometric process. Obviously, the

following conclusions can be obtained: