# An Industrial-Scale Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Requirements Engineering: Empirical Evaluation with Automotive Manufacturing Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20534 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20534/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG pipeline design and evaluation, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 7 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG pipeline design and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-pipeline-design-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [LLMLingua: Compressing Prompts for Accelerated Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05736/) (2023)
- [Retrieval Augmented Code Generation and Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11601/) (2021)
- [Traceability in the Wild: Automatically Augmenting Incomplete Trace Links](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02433/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Requirements engineering in Industry 4.0 faces critical challenges with heterogeneous, unstructured documentation spanning technical specifications, supplier lists, and compliance standards. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) shows promise for knowledge-intensive tasks, no prior work has evaluated RAG on authentic industrial RE workflows using comprehensive production-grade performance metrics. This paper presents a comprehensive empirical evaluation of RAG for industrial requirements engineering automation using authentic automotive manufacturing documentation comprising 669 requirements across four specification standards (MBN 9666-1, MBN 9666-2, BQF 9666-5, MBN 9666-9) spanning 2015-2023, plus 49 supplier qualifications with extensive supporting documentation. Through controlled comparisons with BERT-based and ungrounded LLM approaches, the framework achieves 98.2% extraction accuracy with complete traceability, outperforming baselines by 24.4% and 19.6%, respectively. Hybrid semantic-lexical retrieval achieves MRR of 0.847. Expert quality assessment averaged 4.32/5.0 across five dimensions. The evaluation demonstrates 83% reduction in manual analysis time and 47% cost savings through multi-provider LLM orchestration. Ablation studies quantify individual component contributions. Longitudinal analysis reveals a 55% reduction in requirement volume coupled with 1,800% increase in IT security focus, identifying 10 legacy suppliers (20.4%) requiring requalification, representing potential 2.3M in avoided contract penalties.