This paper studies a cold standby repairable system with working vacations and vacation interruption. The repairman’s multiple vacations policy, the working vacations policy and the vacation interruption are considered simultaneously. The lifetime of components follows a phase-type(PH) distribution. The repair time in the regular repair period and the working vacation period follow other two PH distributions at different rates. For this system, the vector-valued Markov process governing the system is constructed. We obtain several important performance measures for the system in transient and stationary regimes applying matrixanalytic methods. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the results obtained. The paper studies a cold standby repairable system with working vacations and vacation interruption. The repairman’s multiple vacations policy, the working vacations policy and the vacation interruption are considered simultaneously. The lifetime of components follows a phase-type (PH) distribution. The repair time For the system repair time and the working vacation period follow other two PH distributions at different rates. For this system, the vector-valued Markov process governing the system is constructed. We obtain several important performance measures for the system in transient and stationary regimes. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the results obtained.