The present article aims at modeling a day-ahead local electricity market (DA LEM) for transactive energy trading at the distribution level. In this regard, a wide range of distributed energy resources (DERs) in the form of multiple aggregators (AGs) participates in the DA LEM in order to trade energy with the distribution system operator (DSO), the operator of the market. On the other hand, the DSO, as the owner of the system, has the responsibility to procure the required energy of its customers with respect to the technical constraints of the distribution network. To settle the designed local market, a Stackelberg game-based approach is exploited in this research work. In the raised Stackelberg scheme, the leader of the game, the DSO, seeks to maximize its expected profit, while followers of the game, DER AGs, tend to minimize their operating costs. Ultimately, to evaluate the proposed framework, a typical case study is implemented on a modified IEEE-33 bus test system.INDEX TERMS DER aggregator, distribution system operator, local electricity market, Stackelberg game, transactive energy trading.