Agents of Change will give the appropriate responses to create a dz instance when you hail them. For most, /say wish to start the dz, then /say ready to go in, but in velious a few aoc's are set to cover multiple zones. They have lockouts listed in the same alt z expedition window for time/god/oow. Generally, they have a 6.5 day lockout for trash loot, a 3 day replay timer (does normally go up to the 6.5 hours if you kill certain mobs), and then 6.5 day lockout for any named you kill. Named are limited to those mobs that get motm on tlp servers as that is the tag that forces them to spawn. Unlike the other expedition based dz, they do give lockouts to every character on the same server/account as the character who is in the dz. There are some zones that are too large to clear out in the 6 hour time limit of a dz, those zones act differently for their lockouts, although the trash loot lockout does generally still hold. I do think they removed keys from the trash loot lockout for vt so that you can still get the keys, and I think the trash that spawns is based on which named are still left to kill so that you don't have to reclear trash for each of the wings. Some of the lockouts get triggered when you start an event, such as Cursed cycle in ssra starts when you kill one of the 10 taskmasters/warden/rhozeths.
You can spawn a aoc dz with offline chars. I have done so with 5 chars from the same account to avoid getting the lockout on other accounts cause i needed to do a hand in and wanted to make sure I would only have to leave 1 char out if i got time to go do something in that dz.
I will try to answer any other questions yall have. They are fairly straight forward, but there are lots of annoyances with them. Server crashes after you have killed the first trash mob. That zones could easily be on a 2.5 day replay lockout and 6.5 day replay timer. Go to the aoc in ew, accidently request sleeper's tomb instead of kael, you either do st then or eat the 2.5 day replay timer even though you kicked everyone out of the dz before it was actually available to enter.