Bi-level emission-flow scheduling with carbon-finance governance for integrated service providers in cross-carrier smart market operation

Low-carbon urban districts require energy-community flexibility to be coordinated with coupled electricity and natural-gas infrastructures while preserving network security, participant autonomy, and accountable carbon settlement. Existing approaches often separate local renewable and mobility decisions from network operation or assign carbon obligations without tracing their physical origin. This study develops a hierarchical mixed-integer linear scheduling architecture for ten multi-energy communities connected to a modified 69-bus electricity network and a 65-node natural-gas network. Community conversion, multi-form storage, flexible demand, and vehicle batteries are coordinated with network dispatch through residual-adaptive alternating direction method of multipliers, while information-gap decision theory protects operation against joint renewable and demand deviations. The core contribution is a carbon-finance governance mechanism that maps carrier-specific carbon intensities from upstream procurement, gas-fired generation, delivery paths, and local conversion into community-level financial responsibility and settlement. The adaptive coordination preserves the conventional market equilibrium with 54.25% fewer iterations. Carbon-conditioned settlement reduces the combined attributed carbon footprint by 28.25%, while the associated cleaner redispatch increases daily expenditure by 63.93%, revealing a measurable cost-carbon trade-off under carbon-finance governance. Coordinated vehicle participation further reduces aggregate daily expenditure by 8.44% and improves voltage, gas pressure, and branch loading. The results support carbon-finance policies that allocate financial responsibility according to the operational origin and carrier pathway of emissions rather than aggregate post-dispatch accounting. The framework therefore links urban decarbonization with carrier-resolved carbon liability, decentralized settlement, privacy preservation, and infrastructure feasibility.