COMPASS: An Intelligent Tool for Automating the Organization of Energy Infrastructure Regulations Using Large Language Models

INFRA-COMPASS is an innovative software tool designed to address the time-consuming and complex problem of collecting regulatory information in the energy infrastructure field. It uses large language models (such as GPT-4o-mini) and web scraping technology to automatically compile and maintain lists of state and local regulations, supporting policy research, compliance analysis, and more. The tool is open-source and flexible to deploy, significantly improving efficiency and reducing costs.

The development and operation of energy infrastructure are subject to multi-level regulations at the federal, state, and local levels. Traditional manual collection of regulations is inefficient and prone to omissions. INFRA-COMPASS systematically builds and maintains a comprehensive database of energy infrastructure regulations through automated technologies (especially the understanding and extraction capabilities of large language models).

COMPASS is developed in Python, with core reliance on large language models for information extraction and structuring. It uses Playwright for web scraping, calls the OpenAI API to identify regulatory clauses and store them in a structured manner. The environment is managed via Pixi to ensure cross-platform reproducibility. Users can install it via PyPI (pip install infra-compass) or run from source code.

COMPASS has a wide range of application scenarios:

Policy Research and Analysis: Quickly obtain an overview of regulations in specific regions, conduct horizontal comparisons and trend identification; Project Development Support: Assist energy developers in site selection and feasibility studies; Compliance Review: Help enterprises regularly check regulatory changes and reduce legal risks; Academic Research: Provide a data foundation for fields such as energy policy and environmental law.

Taking two counties as an example, the cost of running a complete extraction process using the GPT-4o-mini model is approximately $0.45. Compared to manual input, it has significant economic advantages, and the automated process greatly improves research efficiency.

COMPASS is open-sourced under the BSD-3-Clause license, encouraging community participation and contributions. It provides detailed development guides and documentation (installation instructions, execution examples, contribution guidelines) to facilitate continuous project improvement and function expansion, serving as a technical framework reference for research in similar fields.

The challenges facing COMPASS include: continuous maintenance of the accuracy and timeliness of regulatory information, and control of information hallucinations in large language models. Future development directions may include expanding to more regions and types of regulations, and supporting multi-language regulatory processing.

INFRA-COMPASS is a typical case of applying large language models in professional fields. By automating information collection to empower traditional research workflows, it allows researchers to focus on analysis and decision-making, which is of great significance for accelerating energy transition and policy optimization.