When Agents Meet Electric Bus Fleet Operations: Pricing Behavior, Trade-offs, and Policy Implications in an Aggregator Framework

2026-06-24

AI Summary

This study addresses the multidimensional, dynamically coupled challenges in electric bus fleet operations—encompassing service reliability, battery state, charger availability, electricity price volatility, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) coordination—by proposing the first integrated agent-based and optimization-driven scheduling framework. Combining mixed-integer optimization, multi-agent systems, and real-time re-optimization, the framework enables dynamic coordination among disturbance detection, price-responsive dispatch, and schedule evaluation, while unifying physical feasibility and operational flexibility in a single modeling paradigm. It innovatively introduces a configurable coordination mode to balance value allocation between operators and aggregators, revealing the risk of profit-driven pricing eroding public transit service quality. Real-world depot validation demonstrates the approach’s ability to maintain schedule feasibility, selectively trigger re-optimization, and enhance the utilization efficiency of charging–discharging flexibility, underscoring the policy imperative for transparent coordination mechanisms and auditable pricing rules.

Abstract

Agentic systems are changing how complex operational tasks are coordinated, introducing a new paradigm for connecting heterogeneous data sources and automating processes. Electric bus fleets provide a relevant test case. Their operation requires continuous coordination between service reliability, battery state-of-charge, charger availability, electricity prices, route-energy uncertainty, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) opportunities. This paper proposes an agentic aggregator framework that streamlines this decision environment by coupling an optimization-based electric bus scheduling model with supervisory agents for disturbance detection, tariff adaptation, and schedule evaluation. The optimization core enforces physical feasibility across routes, chargers, batteries, and V2G exchanges, while the agentic layer interprets changing operating conditions, triggers real-time re-optimization when needed, and defines how flexibility value is allocated between the aggregator and the public transport operator (PTO). A realistic depot case study evaluates day-ahead and real-time operations under profit-based and operation-based coordination modes, considering service delays, route-energy deviations, electricity price shocks, and combined disturbances. The results show that agentic aggregation can support adaptive fleet-grid coordination by maintaining feasible schedules, activating re-optimization selectively, and improving the use of charging and V2G flexibility. However, they also reveal a critical trade-off: the same agentic capability that reduces operational complexity can extract value from the PTO when configured around profit-oriented pricing. These findings suggest that agentic aggregators can become useful for managing electric bus V2G operations, but their deployment in public-fleet contexts requires transparent coordination modes, auditable tariff-setting, and explicit value-sharing rules.

Problem

• electric bus fleet
• vehicle-to-grid (V2G)
• aggregator framework
• operational coordination
• value allocation

Innovation

• agentic aggregator
• electric bus fleet
• vehicle-to-grid (V2G)
• real-time re-optimization
• flexibility value allocation