A Sequential and Asynchronous Federated Learning Framework for Railway Point Machine Fault Diagnosis With Imperfect Data Transmission

Fault diagnosis of railway assets has drawn the interest of both the scholarly and engineering communities. Federated learning (FL) enables training models across distributed assets to preserve data privacy and reduce high data transfer costs, which has been applied in fault diagnosis. However, the imperfect data transmission problem due to communication errors easily results in low accuracy of FL-based fault diagnosis in the railway system. To solve the problem, a sequential and asynchronous federated learning framework is proposed for fault diagnosis of railway point machines (RPMs) in this work. First, a dual-branch network is proposed as the global model in asynchronous FL for reducing parameters, while maintaining high accuracy. Second, a time cycle mechanism based on sequential Kalman filtering is proposed for reducing the negative impact of data communication errors. Finally, experimental results demonstrates that the proposed method enhances the applicability of online RPM fault diagnosis training in real deployment scenarios.