Heterogeneity-Aware Personalized Federated Learning for Industrial Predictive Analytics

Abstract

Federated prognostics enable clients (e.g., companies, factories, and production lines) to collaboratively develop a failure time prediction model while keeping each client's data local and confidential. However, traditional federated models often assume homogeneity in the degradation processes across clients, an assumption that may not hold in many industrial settings. To overcome this, this paper proposes a personalized federated prognostic model designed to accommodate clients with heterogeneous degradation processes, allowing them to build tailored prognostic models. The prognostic model iteratively facilitates the underlying pairwise collaborations between clients with similar degradation patterns, which enhances the performance of personalized federated learning. To estimate parameters jointly using decentralized datasets, we develop a federated parameter estimation algorithm based on proximal gradient descent. The proposed approach addresses the limitations of existing federated prognostic models by simultaneously achieving model personalization, preserving data privacy, and providing comprehensive failure time distributions. The superiority of the proposed model is validated through extensive simulation studies and a case study using the turbofan engine degradation dataset from the NASA repository.