Turn Regulation Into Actionable Engineering Reality
- We have extracted the obligations from prose-based regulations (e.g. MAA RA 1600)
- Make responsibilities and judgement points explicit
- Link regulation directly to engineering activity and evidence
- Reduce interpretation time for your regulatory team by ~75%
The Hidden Bottleneck in Defence Delivery
- Regulation is clear in intent but buried in prose
- Interpretation is manual, inconsistent, and slow
- Assurance is too late in the lifecycle
- SMEs and new entrants are structurally disadvantaged
A single regulatory article can take ~30 hours of expert interpretation
— with no consistent way to capture assumptions or decisions
From Regulatory Prose to Structured Engineering Obligations
Regulation is typically written as narrative text.
Engineering programmes, however, require structured information.
MaRIE bridges this gap by transforming regulatory prose into structured elements such as:
- obligations
- actors
- actions
- conditions
- evidence expectations
These structured elements allow regulatory intent to be connected more directly to engineering artefacts.
This supports activities such as:
- assurance planning
- certification preparation
- compliance evidence mapping
- regulatory engagement.
Example Application
Early development work has focused on elements of the UK Military Aviation Authority regulatory framework, including parts of the RA1600 family relating to Uncrewed Air Systems categorisation.
This work demonstrated that significant engineering effort can be required simply to interpret the obligations embedded within regulatory prose.
MaRIE provides a structured approach to identifying and representing those obligations while preserving full traceability to the source regulation.
Technical Approach
The MaRIE methodology combines structured regulatory analysis with emerging AI techniques.
Key elements include:
Regulatory Obligation Extraction
Natural language analysis is used to identify candidate obligations embedded within regulatory text.
These obligations are decomposed into structured elements including:
- actor
- modality
- action
- object
- conditions
This approach reflects established requirements engineering principles used within complex systems engineering.
Regulatory Ontologies
Regulatory concepts are represented within a domain ontology describing relationships between:
- regulatory artefacts
- actors and authorities
- obligations and evidence
- engineering activities.
This enables consistent classification of regulatory information.
Knowledge Graph Representation
Structured regulatory elements can be represented within a knowledge graph linking:
- regulations
- obligations
- engineering artefacts
- compliance evidence.
This representation enables exploration of relationships across complex regulatory frameworks.
Traceable Engineering Artefacts
The structured outputs generated by MaRIE can support the creation of traceable regulatory artefacts linking:
regulation
→ obligations
→ engineering activities
→ compliance evidence
This supports a more systematic approach to regulatory assurance.
Future Direction
The longer-term vision for MaRIE is to support a more dynamic relationship between engineering programmes and regulation.
Potential future capabilities include:
- structured regulatory knowledge bases
- interactive regulatory exploration tools
- automated traceability between regulation and programme artefacts
- support for emerging autonomous system regulatory frameworks
This approach could enable a shift from static regulatory interpretation towards
live regulatory intelligence supporting complex engineering systems.
Collaboration
Please get in touch, we are open to collaboration with like minded people.
Genersol is currently exploring the development of MaRIE in collaboration with research and innovation partners across the UK defence ecosystem.
We welcome discussion with organisations interested in advancing approaches to regulatory intelligence within complex engineering environments.
