BlockTransit-AI: a decentralized artificial intelligence framework for adaptive energy-efficient public transportation in Indian metropolitan cities during geopolitical fuel crises

The geopolitical disruption of fuel supply to Indian metropolitan cities (with more than 350 million daily commuters) continues to pose a critical risk to the public transit systems because they rely on centralized dispatch architecture and the use of fossil fuels to generate schedules. Although recent studies have focused on AI-driven transit optimization and blockchain-based resource management, no current framework combines real-time geopolitical risk quantification, federated multi-agent reinforcement learning and permissioned smart contract-enforced fuel allocation into one, crisis-adaptive transit control system in a critical way since India is structurally reliant on imported petroleum. In this paper, a new three-level decentralized AI design based on BlockTransit-AI will be proposed to address this gap by integrating permissioned blockchain (Hyperledger Fabric), Federated Deep Q-Networks (FDQN), and edge-computing inference to manage energy-adaptive public transit. This work has four key novelties: (i) a Geopolitical Crisis Index (GCI), which is a synthesis of commodity futures volatility, diplomatic tension indices and supply-chain telemetry, autonomously activates operational policy switching between Normal, Alert, and Crisis modes; (ii) Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts (FuelTokenIssuer, DepotBidManager, CrisisReallocator) to issue CNG, hydrogen, and EV charging resources in a tamper-proof, auditable manner; (iii) a federated MARL architecture that is capable of autonomously rerouting between distributed edge nodes without a centralized coordinate; and (iv) a hysteresis-stabilized mode-transition protocol that prevents operational instability during marginal crisis periods. Delays in passenger waiting times dropped 28.9% and fleet fuel consumption dropped 34.7% as simulations on synthesized transit networks using Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata as blueprints show that next generation urban transit can be built around scalable, fault-tolerant frameworks