Eliminate Conflicts and Attacks: Fair and Robust Federated Learning for Anomaly Detection of Charging Stations

The rapid expansion of electric vehicles (EVs) charging stations underscores the urgent need for robust anomaly detection systems capable of identifying potential malfunctions while preserving data privacy. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution, enabling collaborative model training without requiring raw data sharing. However, applying conventional FL approaches to charging station networks presents significant challenges, including non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data and gradient conflicts among clients. To address these challenges, we introduce FedPareto, a novel Pareto-optimal FL framework designed to manage gradient conflicts and counter malicious attacks in charging station anomaly detection. FedPareto features a gradient conflict-aware aggregation method, which adaptively adjusts client weights based on cosine similarity between gradients, and a gradient magnitude reshaping strategy to enhance model convergence. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that FedPareto achieves a convergence rate of O(<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\frac{1}{T}$</tex-math></inline-formula>) and attains Pareto-optimal solutions under standard smoothness and convexity assumptions. Extensive experiments on real-world charging station datasets validate FedPareto’s effectiveness. It outperforms state-of-the-art methods, exhibits better robustness against gradient-based attacks, and ensures equitable performance distribution across clients. These results highlight FedPareto’s potential as a reliable and scalable solution for anomaly detection in EV charging station networks.