Differentially Private Federated Learning for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is essential for the safe and cost-effective operation of safety-critical systems such as electronic components and engines. While data-driven machine learning approaches have demonstrated strong performance for RUL estimation, their effectiveness is limited by the lack of full run-to-failure data and by strict privacy and intellectual property constraints in industrial settings. Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple data owners without direct data sharing, but it does not, by itself, provide formal privacy guarantees and remains vulnerable to information leakage. This paper presents a privacy-preserving DP-enhanced FL setup for RUL prediction that combines federated learning with differential privacy (DP). We describe an end-to-end implementation based on the Opacus DP library, highlight practical challenges arising from the integration of DP into recurrent neural network architectures, and propose solutions to address them. Using two representative RUL datasets (CMAPSS and SiC MOSFET), we analyze the effect of DP noise on prediction performance and on the functional dependence between the predicted RUL and the already lived life feature. The results demonstrate that differential privacy can be integrated into federated RUL prediction with limited degradation in predictive performance, providing practical insights for deploying privacy-aware collaborative models in industrial environments.