FedCAE: A New Federated Learning Framework for Edge-Cloud Collaboration Based Machine Fault Diagnosis

With the coming of the industrial Big Data era, data-driven fault diagnosis models emerge recently and show potential results in many studies. However, it is impractical to collect massive high-quality data in actual industrial applications, which strongly reduces the performance of fault diagnosis models. Therefore, multiple data owners are motivated to share their own data for training a brilliant model with the aggregated dataset. Notwithstanding, it is unrealistic to share data due to the potential conflict of interest. For addressing the issue of data island, a new federated framework namely FedCAE is proposed for fault diagnosis. In this framework, each client is equipped with a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) trained by its corresponding local data. Then, all CAEs are uploaded to a server and aggregated to a global CAE according to an adaptive weighted selection mechanism. Afterwards, the global CAE is downloaded to all clients for extracting low-level features from local datasets by its encoder and uploading these features to train a global fault diagnosis classifier in the server. At last, the classifier is downloaded to all clients for completing their own diagnosis tasks. Experiment results on two bearing datasets suggest FedCAE offers a promising solution on confidential decentralized learning.