Data Disparity and Temporal Unavailability Aware Asynchronous Federated Learning for Predictive Maintenance on Transportation Fleets

Abstract Predictive maintenance has emerged as a critical application in modern transportation, leveraging sensor data to forecast potential damages proactively using machine learning. However, privacy concerns limit data sharing, making Federated learning an appealing approach to preserve data privacy. Nevertheless, challenges arise due to disparities in data distribution and temporal unavailability caused by individual usage patterns in transportation. In this paper, we present a novel asynchronous federated learning approach to address system heterogeneity and facilitate machine learning for predictive maintenance on transportation fleets. The approach introduces a novel data disparity aware aggregation scheme and a federated early stopping method for training. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we evaluate it on two independent real-world datasets from the transportation domain: 1) oil dilution prediction of car combustion engines and 2) remaining lifetime prediction of plane turbofan engines. Our experiments show that we reliably outperform five state-of-the-art baselines, including federated and classical machine learning models. Moreover, we show that our approach generalises to various prediction model architectures.