PSI - Issue 62

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Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

210 © 2024 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 ) Peer-review under responsibility of Scientific Board Members Keywords: Bridge management system; BMS; Italian Guidelines; Bridge; Digital; Inspection Emerenziana Locatelli et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 62 (2024) 209–216

1. Introduction Bridges are strategic for the economic and social welfare and support access to emergency services. However, being less redundant than roads, they are one of the most critical elements in the infrastructural system for the resilience of the transportation network. Unfortunately, collapses of the last years highlight fragility of bridges, viaducts and overpasses, which require particular attention for the evaluation and the planning of improvement and/or modification works (Bazzucchi et al., 2018). Problems in Italy can relate to the aging of structures, to the significant increase in terms of traffic volume and weight they were designed for, to the absence of a defined inspection program and to the lack of a complete and well-organized database (Buratti et al., 2022). To cape these problems, Italian Ministry of Transport adopts Guidelines for the classification, risk management, safety and monitoring of existing bridges (referred as Guidelines from so on). Guidelines and the correlated Operative Instructions define a common cyclical methodology for the inspection phase and the planning of future interventions. In addition, they strongly recommend the adoption of information models to gather information, such as already required for new public structures (MIMS, 2022). Indeed, it is important to adopt appropriate instruments to manage and update bridge inventory, to record data upon inspections, to plan short-term and long-term interventions and finally to optimize global fund allocation considering the available information on the stock (Santarsiero et al., 2021). Bridge Management Systems (BMS) can absolve to these requirements. Their research began at the end of 1980s and, in the following years, there has been a progressive evolution: in 2014, worldwide, there were 25 BMS used by 18 countries (Fattorini et al., 2023). As emerge from the overview given by Adey et al. (2014), the structure of a BMS focused especially on the collection and management of data. Bridge owners may administrate from few to hundreds of structures, thus it can be fundamental to have a support, as examples, in determination of maintenance intervention, analysis of the transportation network and allocation of economical and human resources. For this reason, BMS producers introduced specific functions for the elaboration of data in graphs, syntactical reports and alert systems in order to support the manager. In conclusion, BMS represent an additional value compared to a mere digital archive. Data are not only organized and stored but are also utilized to enable a systematic determination of the present and future needs, both technical and economical, for proper maintenance (Zonta et al., 2005). On the other hand, a minor attention is given to the management of users interactions in the architecture of these digital instruments. However, as explained in detail in the following chapters, the maintenance cycle proposed by Guidelines involves three main actors – inspectors, bridge owners and Ministry – that relate each other following intricate fluxes. For this reason, a valid BMS must include all the mechanisms in order to create a collaborative workplace, since quality of results is based not only on data administration but also on users and fluxes management. After briefly describing Guidelines procedure and presenting the actors – technicians, bridge owners and Ministry - involved, the aim of this paper is to analyse how to integrate the indicated process in an operative flux. The study highlight the steps in which is possible to improve interaction among actors and describes a possible implementation of the flux model in a Bridge Management System, such as done in INBEE, a new BMS that applies the latest version of the Italian Guidelines. 2. Guidelines level flux Guidelines standardise bridge analysis using six levels of assessment, with a multilevel classification approach. Figure 1 represents the Levels flux.