Privacy-preserving intelligent fault diagnostics for wind turbine clusters using federated stacked capsule autoencoder

Abstract

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the field of health monitoring has introduced the paradigm of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to the industry. IIoT systems provide enterprises with a substantial volume of monitoring data for industrial equipment health monitoring, facilitating the development of artificial intelligence fault diagnosis models. However, a singular industrial entity often encounters limitations in collecting sufficient training data in practical scenarios. Moreover, the sharing of confidential information among entities is strictly prohibited due to concerns regarding intellectual property and data security. This study proposes a fault diagnosis system that addresses this issue by incorporating a capsule-based fault feature expression into the federated learning (FL) framework. The system comprises clients distributed across multiple factories and a central server hosted in the cloud. The client models are trained on local private datasets, and then knowledge fusion is achieved by uploading intrinsic templates and pose matrices to the central server. The proposed method offers the advantage of reducing transmission burden and enhancing data security in comparison to existing FL approaches. Besides, a capsule knowledge alignment algorithm is proposed to update the capsule-based fault feature expression ona central server. To simulate real fault diagnosis application scenarios, two similar fault simulation platforms are built to acquire isolated fault diagnosis datasets. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified using these datasets.