PSI - Issue 62

Erika Garusi et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 62 (2024) 233–240 E. Garusi et al./ Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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and safety upgrading interventions if required. The supervision strategies are defined on the basis of inspection data and outcomes, stored in an organized database that can be queried and used to create a “dashboard”. This “dashboard” aims for monitoring and planning purposes. This "dashboard", aimed at monitoring and planning ANSFISA supervision strategies, also has to provide decision-makers at ANSFISA with an overall view of the key indicators deemed relevant for managing the inspection outcomes of road infrastructures under ANSFISA’s oversight. The characterization with these indicators aims to capture the “safety situation”, “types of intervention needs”, and the “status of work” in relation to the actions undertaken by the managing entity, concerning individual road system elements/structures (Grimaz et al., 2024). 5.1. Inspections physical assets on site It is therefore important to highlight the distinction in roles between the supervisory authority, i.e., ANSFISA, responsible for monitoring and notifying evidence of risk situations, and the managing entities, responsible for managing and ensuring the infrastructure safety. The role of the supervisory authority is to identify and classify any evidence of safety deficiences and, when necessary, notify the managing entities of the need to address or control these issues in a timely and appropriate manner, based on the identified situation. Thus, the supervisory activities require specific procedural tools and evaluation methods, distinct from those used by the managing entities or other organisms. Multiple managing entities exist within the Italian territory, and typically, different entities adopt their own methodologies for performing assessments and maintenance. Moreover, the same infrastructure may be managed and inspected by different entities for different scopes (Grimaz et al., 2024). In the period July – November 2021 and at the beginning of 2022, in compliance with the 2021 and 2022 annual programs, the Agency carried out inspections of physical assets on site, supervising infrastructures (road, bridges, tunnels), managed by the national road Manager and four highway Managers. However, in July 2022, the Italian Government revoked a Highway Operator’s concession agreement due to alleged “serious breaches” in implementing safety measures. The Government simultaneously entrusted the management of the highways Infrastructure without a manager, to another Operator and entrusted to ANSFISA the verification of the safety conditions of the entire highway infrastructures, in accordance with the institutive rule. So, the Agency interrupted the 2022 supervision annual program of inspections on site and adopted an extraordinary supervision program to conform with the government's demands (See Fig.2).

Fig. 2. Supervision Structural Inspections (Bridges and Tunnels)

As a result of the above-mentioned activities, procedural and systemic critical issues were found out, which could be identified after the first phase of inspection activities and confirmed by subsequent activities. The experience in the field and the results of the activities have confirmed that, in relation to the surveillance resources available compared to the extension of the Italian national road network, it is essential to concentrate the resources where the surveillance is of greatest value if it is carried out on a sample of infrastructures and not on the entire infrastructure. Therefore, in the case mentioned above, the Agency could have planned, based on the above