This paper presents a new competitive approach to provide reliability for distribution system customers. The model is based on the Cournot game and utilizes the Nash equilibrium concept to find the output of the problem. Reliability in the proposed framework is an ancillary service and the customers who participated in the program must pay for reliability provision. The proposed model also considers regulatory concerns of reliability insuring the average reliability of the system is not incurred. Based on the proposed model, customers will compete for their reliability enhancement considering all the constraints related to the network, regulator and each customer. The expected outage time for each customer is considered the reliability index in this paper. The model is investigated in a sample case study and the results show how a customer would behave if they participated in the reliability improvement program of distribution systems. Our results also show that there would exist a high motivation for both parties (utility and customers) to implement the proposed model for the reliability enhancement of the distribution system.

Keywords