# What is Regulatory Engineering? > Regulatory Engineering is the design and development of systems that transform regulatory requirements into structured, machine-readable, testable and executable representations that software and AI systems can use. It applies knowledge representation, formal rules, provenance and validation to legislation, regulation, standards and policy, so that the requirements they contain can be checked, reasoned over and kept in step with change. Canonical: https://sireto.com/regulatory-engineering ## Why the discipline exists Regulation is written for people. Software and AI systems need structured, computable representations. Between the two sits a gap that each organisation closes by hand: lawyers interpret, analysts write requirements, engineers encode rules, and the links between them are lost. Regulatory Engineering treats that gap as an engineering problem. The requirement, its source, its interpretation and its executable form are kept connected, so the result can be tested, audited and updated like any other engineered artefact. ## What Regulatory Engineering involves The discipline combines seven elements. - Structured legal sources: documents, provisions, definitions and identifiers in machine-readable form, for example Akoma Ntoso. - Knowledge representation: regulatory knowledge graphs of requirements, concepts, actors, conditions, exceptions and their relationships. - Formal rules: obligations, permissions, prohibitions and conditions expressed in representations that software can evaluate deterministically, for example LegalRuleML or a domain-specific language. - Provenance: every assertion traceable to the provision that justifies it, in standards such as W3C PROV. - Regulatory reasoning: deriving what applies, to whom, under which conditions, and which rule takes precedence. - Automated compliance: evaluating policies, controls, data and system behaviour against the rules. - Interoperable standards: representations that can be exchanged and validated across organisations and borders. ## Regulatory Engineering compared with neighbouring fields Legal tech typically helps lawyers work with text. RegTech typically helps compliance teams run processes. Rules as code focuses on drafting legislation and policy in executable form. Regulatory Engineering overlaps with all three but is defined by its output: a structured, machine-readable and executable representation of regulatory requirements, with the provenance to trust it. ## How Sireto practises Regulatory Engineering Sireto is an AI and Regulatory Engineering company. Its platform NormLogic applies the discipline end to end: AI-assisted extraction of requirements from source documents, a structured regulatory knowledge model, formal machine-executable rules, and provenance from source to decision. The first application is automated regulatory compliance: checking an organisation’s policies and controls against the regulations that apply. ## Frequently asked questions ### Is Regulatory Engineering the same as rules as code? No. Rules as code is a movement to draft legislation and policy in executable form, often inside government. Regulatory Engineering is the broader engineering discipline that also covers existing regulation, structured sources, knowledge representation, provenance and automated compliance. Rules as code is one practice within it. ### Who needs Regulatory Engineering? Regulated enterprises that maintain compliance rules by hand, public administrations implementing legislation in digital services, technology providers that need regulatory constraints in their products, and anyone deploying AI systems that must act within regulatory limits. ### Does Regulatory Engineering replace lawyers or compliance officers? No. It gives them structured, traceable artefacts to review, approve and maintain instead of documents and spreadsheets. Interpretation remains a human responsibility; the engineering makes that interpretation explicit, testable and reusable. ## Related - [What is machine-readable regulation?](https://sireto.com/machine-readable-regulation) - [What is machine-executable regulation?](https://sireto.com/machine-executable-regulation) - [What is regulation as code?](https://sireto.com/regulation-as-code) - [NormLogic](https://sireto.com/normlogic)