RoamML Platform: Enabling Distributed Continual Learning for Disaster Relief Operations

Machine learning offers a promising avenue for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making in disaster recovery and relief efforts. These operations face significant hurdles due to the large volumes of data, intermittent connectivity, and infrastructure limitations. In this paper, we present the RoamML Platform, a sophisticated modular implementation of the RoamML framework, designed specifically to address these challenges and enable efficient distributed machine learning. We advocate for a foundational principle that "the transmission of the ML model itself is usually more efficient than the costly transfer of large datasets", leading to a more adaptable training regime. The platform orchestrates the activities of the RoamML model along with its related metadata, collectively referred to as the "RoamML Agent", while faithfully observing the Data Gravity principle to guarantee thorough model training. We extensively validated the platform through a simulated disaster recovery scenario employing the Mininet-WiFi emulator. Our results highlight the benefits of integrating the RoamML framework, including enhanced ML performance and significant bandwidth savings.