Efficient maximum data age analysis for cause-effect chains in automotive systems

Automotive systems are often subjected to stringent requirements on the maximum data age of certain cause-effect chains. In this paper, we present an efficient method for formally analyzing maximum data age of cause-effect chains. In particular, we decouple the problem of bounding the maximum data age of a chain into a problem of bounding the releasing interval of successive Last-to-Last data propagation instances in the chain. Owing to the problem decoupling, a relatively tighter data age upper bound can be effectively obtained in polynomial time. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve high precision analysis with lower computational cost.