Reliability assessment is of crucial importance for power systems planning and operation. Traditional reliability assessment methods mainly concern on analyzing electricity outages observed from the system side

regardless of whether end users are in need of consuming electricity during such outage events. Thus

it may not truly reflect the actual impacts of outages on the reliability level suffered from the consumer side. To overcome the deficiency

a user-aware reliability assessment method is proposed in this paper. According to the method

the reliability level sensed by users is effectively assessed with respect to outage time and load curve of customers. A method is proposed to assess the severity of an outage based on the interruption time while also considering customer power consumption features. New metrics for assessing user-aware reliability are proposed to better reflect the impact of outage suffered and sensed from customer side. The IEEE-RBTS distribution system is studied to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model

metrics

and method.