Predictive maintenance has emerged as a critical application in modern transportation, leveraging sensor data to forecast potential damages proactively using machine learning. However, privacy concerns limit data sharing, making Federated learning an appealing approach to preserve data privacy. Nevertheless, challenges arise due to disparities in data distribution and temporal unavailability caused by individual usage patterns in transportation. In this paper, we present a novel asynchronous federated learning approach to address system heterogeneity and facilitate machine learning for predictive maintenance on transportation fleets. The approach introduces a novel data disparity aware aggregation scheme and a federated early stopping method for training. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we evaluate it on two independent real-world datasets from the transportation domain: 1) oil dilution prediction of car combustion engines and 2) remaining lifetime prediction of plane turbofan engines. Our experiments show that we reliably outperform five state-of-the-art baselines, including federated and classical machine learning models. Moreover, we show that our approach generalises to various prediction model architectures.

The transition from conventional mobility to electromobility largely depends on charging infrastructure availability and optimal placement. This paper examines the optimal placement of charging stations in urban areas. We maximise the charging infrastructure supply over the area and minimise waiting, travel, and charging times while setting budget constraints. Moreover, we include the possibility of charging vehicles at home to obtain a more refined estimation of the actual charging demand throughout the urban area. We formulate the Placement of Charging Stations problem as a non-linear integer optimisation problem that seeks the optimal positions for charging stations and the optimal number of charging piles of different charging types. We design a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning approach to solve the charging station placement problem (PCRL). Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show how the PCRL reduces the waiting and travel time while increasing the benefit of the charging plan compared to five baselines. Compared to the existing infrastructure, we can reduce the waiting time by up to 97% and increase the benefit up to 497%.