EDT-SaFL: Semi-Asynchronous Federated Learning for Edge Digital Twin in Industrial Internet-of-Things

Through conducting equivalent model training within the paradigm of edge intelligence, the Digital Twin Edge Networks (DITEN) have been widely employed in the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) to facilitate the cost-effective execution without the operational disruption. However, due to the insufficient consideration of heterogeneity in computing and communication capabilities of distinct industrial terminals in the Digital Twin (DT) model training, the existing approaches of DT construction/update have unbalanced model training cost and loss in the whole life cycle of DT model, hindering the abilities of quick responding to complex and dynamic productions and ensuring the data consistency of virtual-real space. To address this issue, we define a global loss minimization problem with constraint, and propose an original approach of semi-asynchronous federated learning, named EDT-SaFL, as a promising solution. Considering the collaborative utilization of heterogeneous resources, and the contribution of local data quantity and quality to the global model update, the EDT-SaFL consists of three important operations, Terminal Selection for Model Training, Self-Adaptation of Local Training Iterations, and Semi-asynchronous Global Aggregation. With the analysis of convergence, complexity and communication overhead, the experiments have evidently demonstrated the superiority of EDT-SaFL on the datasets of CIFAR-10 and Industrial-Equipment.