Ensuring software compliance with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) poses a significant challenge, as requirements engineers must translate complex legal text into actionable software requirements - a process that remains largely manual and error-prone in practice. We present an automated regulation-to-requirements pipeline that identifies requirement-bearing clauses in regulatory documents and derives system-agnostic software requirements, accompanied by plain-language explanations, traceable to their legal sources. We evaluate the pipeline on the full clause sets of the GDPR (398 clauses) and the EU AI Act (574 clauses). For requirement-bearing clause identification, the approach achieves macro-averaged F1 scores of 0.82 and 0.78, respectively, outperforming a SetFit-based baseline. Human evaluation shows high completeness (4.60 and 4.45) and correctness (3.74 and 3.54) of derived requirements, while explanation clarity scores are near-ceiling (4.92 and 4.94) on a 1-5 scale. We implement the approach in Reg2Req, a publicly released tool that further supports requirement classification, use case seeding, cross-reference analysis, definition indexing, and a traceability matrix to operationalize regulatory compliance in practice. A user study with 25 practitioners shows that the plain-language explanations significantly improve comprehension of derived requirements and confidence in acting on them (p < 0.001), and that all participants would use Reg2Req as a starting point for deriving software requirements from a regulation.
Multi-agent AI systems are increasingly used to automate software engineering tasks including requirements analysis, architecture design, test generation, and traceability linking. When these agents operate as a sequential pipeline over shared software artifacts, errors and low-confidence decisions made by upstream agents propagate to downstream stages, producing orphaned requirements, contradictory links, and compliance gaps that pose significant risks in safety-critical domains. We propose a trust-aware coordination framework where a shared knowledge graph serves as both centralized semantic memory and a coordination surface through which agents assess and build upon each other's contributions using calibrated confidence scores. Our approach introduces a two-stage traceability link prediction pipeline combining embedding-based retrieval with LLM-based multi-criteria analysis, a traceability seeding mechanism that enables comparison between derivation-time and validation-time confidence, and a consistency protocol governing pipeline interactions through confidence threshold gating, confidence divergence detection, and conflict resolution. We evaluate on an automotive software engineering case study measuring link prediction calibration, protocol effectiveness, threshold sensitivity, and the impact of traceability seeding. Ablation studies confirm that confidence calibration is essential for effective pipeline coordination.