FCLA-DT: Federated Continual Learning with Authentication for Distributed Digital Twin-Based Industrial IoT

Digital twin (DT) technology is currently pervasive in industrial Internet of things (IoT) applications, notably in predictive maintenance scenarios. Prevailing digital twin-based predictive maintenance methodologies are constrained by a narrow focus on singular physical modeling paradigms, impeding comprehensive analysis of diverse factory data at scale. This paper introduces an improved method, federated continual learning with authentication for distributed digital twin-based industrial IoT (FCLA-DT). This decentralized strategy ensures the continual learning capability vital for adaptive and real-time decision-making in complex industrial predictive maintenance systems. An authentication scheme based on group signature is introduced to enable the verification of digital twin identities during inter-twin collaborations, avoiding unauthorized access and potential model theft. Security analysis shows that FCLA-DT can enable numerous nodes to collaborate learning without compromising individual twin privacy, thereby ensuring group authentication in the cooperative distributed industrial IoT. Performance analysis shows that FCLA-DT outperforms traditional federated learning methods with over 95% fault diagnosis accuracy and ensures the privacy and authentication of digital twins in multi-client task learning.