An Effective Federated Learning Verification Strategy and Its Applications for Fault Diagnosis in Industrial IoT Systems

Due to the diverse equipment and uneven load distribution in industrial environments, data regarding faults are often unbalanced. Moreover, data and models from clients may become contaminated or damaged, affecting diagnostic performance. To overcome these problems, this study proposes a stacking model for diagnosing interturn short circuit (ITSC) faults in permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs). Federated learning (FL) is used to train the model to increase data security and overcome data islanding in distributed scenarios. Moreover, an improved verification strategy was adopted to select appropriate client models in each round to update the FL global model. We created a secondary server-side data set to validate the client weightings. The data set contains clean sample data for all ITSC fault categories. By calculating the fault diagnosis accuracy of the global model on the auxiliary data set, the model eliminates low-quality clients with uneven fault distributions. The improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to optimize the weight coefficients of clients involved in aggregation, improving the robustness of the aggregation strategy under a joint learning system. In evaluation experiments, compared with the federated average (FedAvg) model, the proposed dynamic verification model exhibited the better diagnostic accuracy in situations of data imbalance, incurred lower communication costs, and prevented local oscillations in the model.