This paper proposes a new framework for the operation of distribution companies (discos) in the liberalized electricity market environment considering distributed generation (DG) units and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission penalty cost. The proposed short-term framework is a two-stage model. The first stage, namely day-ahead stage, deals with the activities of discos. This stage includes a optimization problem to minimize the costs of distribution company (operational and CO2 emission costs). The first stage is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) framework using the Benders decomposition to determine the decisions of discos to buy power from grid, schedule the DG units and contract with interruptible loads (ILs). The results of the first stage are imposed as the boundary constraints in the second stage which deals with the activities of discos in an hour-ahead period. In the hour-ahead stage, the retailers determine the amount of purchased active and reactive power from the grid and the production of each DG unit in the energy and reserve market keeping in mind its day-ahead decision to maximize the desired short-term profit. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed framework is studied on a case study. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.