Regulatory Intelligence Assistant

The regulatory intelligence assistant is a conversational research tool for aerospace certification questions. You describe a certification scenario — the aircraft, the modification, the authorities involved — and the system returns a structured, source-cited answer drawing from official authority documentation and broader industry sources.

It searches authority sources (currently EASA and FAA, with additional authorities in progress) alongside OEM publications, practitioner guidance, conference papers, and applied examples. The goal is to return not only what the regulations say, but how certification works in practice.

How this differs from general-purpose chat apps

Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot are built for general conversation and broad knowledge work. The regulatory intelligence assistant is built specifically for aerospace certification research, with structured outputs, authority-grounded sourcing, and clearer boundaries around applicability and escalation.

  • Authority-first research: it explicitly separates official authority sources from broader web material, and authority-specific findings are grounded in domain-filtered citations rather than mixed into one undifferentiated answer.
  • Cross-authority comparison: it is built to show where EASA and FAA align, differ, or require different assumptions instead of collapsing everything into a single generic response.
  • Structured applicability: answers are organized around scope, assumptions, missing context, and escalation boundaries so you can judge whether the answer is actually usable for your scenario.
  • Practice plus regulation: it combines what the rules and guidance say with how the issue is commonly handled in industry, while still distinguishing those two kinds of evidence.
  • Workflow traceability: sessions persist, answers can be saved back into project context, and the result keeps its citation chain instead of living as an isolated chat.

In short: unlike a general-purpose assistant, this workflow is designed to produce a reviewable regulatory position for a concrete certification scenario, with explicit authority grounding, structured uncertainty, and reusable project records.

How it works

You type a question the way you would ask a colleague:

"We are changing avionics on a legacy aircraft under EASA DOA and want to know whether prior compliance evidence can be reused."

The system follows a four-stage process.

1. Ambiguity check

If the question is missing critical context — which authority, what kind of change, what certification basis — the system asks a targeted clarifying question before committing to research.

2. Parallel research

Separate research agents run simultaneously:

  • Authority agents search official regulatory domains (e.g., easa.europa.eu, faa.gov) and extract findings with domain-filtered citations. Each authority is researched independently to produce its own view.
  • General research agent searches more broadly — OEM documentation, industry best practices, practitioner write-ups, applied guidance — to capture established practice beyond what official sources cover.

3. Structured synthesis

The system synthesizes findings into a fixed-format answer with the following sections:

  • Situation summary — a recap of the scenario so you can verify the system understood the question correctly.
  • Overall answer — the direct response.
  • Applicability assessment — what is in scope, what is out of scope, what was assumed, and what missing information could change the answer.
  • Escalation guidance — whether the question is self-serviceable, needs internal review, or requires authority interpretation, with recommended next steps.
  • Authority-specific views — separate findings per authority.
  • Industry and practitioner context — relevant best practices, OEM guidance, and applied knowledge from the broader industry.
  • Citations and evidence — linked sources for every claim.

4. Live progress

While the system works, a live workflow trace shows which authorities are being searched, what queries are running, how many sources were surfaced, and the current synthesis stage.

Example questions

The assistant handles a wide range of certification questions. A few examples:

  • "Is this change major or minor under EASA?"
  • "Can we reuse prior compliance evidence for this STC?"
  • "How does FAA treatment differ from EASA for this modification?"
  • "Does DO-178C apply to our legacy avionics?"
  • "What is the approval process for this change?"
  • "How do OEMs typically handle this kind of modification?"
  • "What are common pitfalls when reusing compliance evidence across programs?"

The system carries forward your scenario context across the conversation, so you can refine and drill deeper with follow-up questions without re-explaining.

Escalation guidance

Every answer includes an escalation recommendation with three levels:

  • Self-serviceable — the evidence is sufficient to proceed without further review.
  • Internal review — the answer should be reviewed by a subject matter expert or certification lead before acting on it.
  • Authority interpretation — the question involves ambiguity or novel applicability that should be raised with the relevant authority.

This is designed to make the boundary between research support and engineering judgment explicit. The system surfaces and organizes evidence; it does not replace the judgment of the engineer or the authority.

Sessions and persistence

Assistant sessions are persistent. You can return to a prior conversation, review the full thread, and continue where you left off.

Individual answers or entire sessions can be saved as artifacts in your project workspace. Saved artifacts preserve the source session ID, timestamps, and full citation chains for traceability.

Supported authorities

EASA and FAA are supported today. Support for additional authorities is in progress.

Each authority is researched through a dedicated agent that searches only official domains for that authority, ensuring that authority-specific findings cite only authoritative sources. The general research agent operates independently and is clearly separated in the answer structure.