FedRUL: A New Federated Learning Method for Edge-Cloud Collaboration Based Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Machines

Abstract

In real industrial applications, intelligent methods are recently emerging for remaining useful life (RUL) prediction. However, their development is hindered by two obstacles. First, it is hard for an ordinary edge client to achieve RUL prediction owing to its weak computing capacity and limited data volume. Second, as for all edge clients, it is unrealistic to share data with each other due to the potential conflict of interests. Therefore, a federated learning-based RUL prediction method namely FedRUL is proposed to solve these problems. In this method, multiple edge clients and a cloud server are applied to train a global encoder and an RUL predictor without data sharing. Each client includes a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) comprised of an encoder and a decoder while the server includes a same encoder and an RUL predictor. During each epoch, CAEs are trained in all clients through their corresponding local training datasets first. Then, all local encoders are uploaded to the server and aggregated to a global encoder through assigning weights for all clients according to their performance on a validation dataset in the server. At last, this global encoder is sent back to all clients for extracting low-level features from their datasets and uploading these features to train the RUL predictor for each client one by one. Two experiments suggest FedRUL offers a promising solution on confidential decentralized learning for RUL prediction.