Cohort-based Federated Learning Services for Industrial Collaboration on
the Edge
Abstract
Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly applied in industrial
manufacturing, but often performance is limited due to insufficient
training data. While ML models can benefit from collaboration, due to
privacy concerns, individual manufacturers cannot share data directly.
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of ML models
without revealing raw data. However, current FL approaches fail to take
the characteristics and requirements of industrial clients into account.
In this work, we propose a FL system consisting of a process description
and a software architecture to provide \acrfull{flaas}
to industrial clients deployed to edge devices. Our approach deals with
skewed data by organizing clients into cohorts with similar data
distributions. We evaluated the system on two industrial datasets. We
show how the FLaaS approach provides FL to client processes by
considering their requests submitted to the Industrial Federated
Learning (IFL) Services API. Experiments on both industrial datasets and
different FL algorithms show that the proposed cohort building can
increase the ML model performance notably.