SafeRAG: A Large-Language-Model-Based Multistage Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Oil and Gas Safety Report Generation

Abstract

In high-risk industrial settings, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for automated accident analysis and generating safety reports has emerged as an efficient workflow. However, this approach is fundamentally constrained by the models’ inherent knowledge limitations, frequently resulting in analyses that lack domain-specific understanding and regulatory alignment. To tackle this issue, we introduce SafeRAG, a multistage retrieval-augmented framework for safety report generation. Specifically, the framework uses an entity-centric approach that prompts the LLMs to internally generate domain-specific knowledge. Concurrently, it performs a hierarchical retrieval of external regulations relevant to the accident at topic, concept, and context levels. To obtain well-structured reports, we leverage prompt engineering, integrating internal and external knowledge. Furthermore, a domain-expert persona is also assigned to help LLMs analyze accidents from a specific perspective. To evaluate our approach, we construct a data set from 10,818 accident-description/report pairs collected from real-world industry reports. Experiments show that SafeRAG substantially outperforms baseline LLMs on metrics that include bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERTScore) and bidirectional auto-regressive transformers (BARTScore), demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.