PSI - Issue 44

Gianluca Costantino et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 44 (2023) 1220–1227 Gianluca Costantino et al. / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2022) 000 – 000

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1. Introduction Italy has a rich infrastructural heritage, made up of bridges, viaducts and overpasses on both road and rail networks. The safety of infrastructural works, of course, is important for commercial purposes and, especially, for the safety of people who travel on them every day. After collapse of some recent Italian bridges , among which the “Polcevera” bridge in Genoa, specific G uidelines on risk classification and management, safety assessment and monitoring of existing bridges have been issued by the Italian Ministry of Public Works as a mandatory code (Italian Ministry of Public Works 2020). The Guidelines, issued by the Superior Council of Public Works (as part of the Ministry of Public Works), propose some standard protocols to collect bridge characteristics and defects. On the basis of these data, several Classes of Attention (CoAs) (Structural-Foundational, Seismic, Landslide and Flood) can be estimated. The above Guidelines represent a new and “experimental” tool. Owing to this, they need to be applied and tested in order to find possible drawbacks and point out the main factors that influence their results. As a matter of fact, several inspection campaigns are in progress on bridges and viaducts of the Italian highways. Also, there is a pressing need to quickly and correctly analyze a large number of data produced by the inspection activities. These analyses aim to obtain a panoramic view of the inspection results, in order to get statistics about characteristics and defects of elements, and lead to the estimation of the CoA. In this paper, a bridge stock located in the Sicilia region (Italy) has been used as a database for the application of the Guidelines. The results highlight the positive and negative aspects of the tool. To manage this large set of data, a purpose web platform has been developed. By means of a Graphical User Interface (GUI), the web platform allows queries for the different parameters of interest. The results are shown by charts. A simple procedure is explained in the following sections to obtain the parameters needed to evaluate the CoAs starting from the inspection results. The application shows the results of the Guidelines approach, in terms of CoAs and related parameters. 2. The Italian Guidelines for the existing bridges The Italian Guidelines can be classified as a qualitative method for the assessment of existing bridges. The CoAs (Seismic, Structural and Foundational, Landslide and Flood) of the single bridge can be high , medium-high , medium , medium-low or low . CoAs generally depend on the characteristics of the bridge. The level of degradation of the structure is considered only for the assessment of Structural-Foundational and Seismic vulnerability. In details, the Guidelines follow a multilevel approach (Santarsiero et al. 2021) and requires expeditious visual inspections to define the CoA (Fig. 1). The approach is developed on six levels: • Level 0: census of the bridge to collect the available information and documentation • Level 1: direct visual inspection and expeditious survey of the structure (to identify the state of decay and the structural and geometric characteristics of the bridge), and of the geo-morphological and hydraulic characteristics of the area (to establish possible risks associated with landslides or floods) • Level 2: the CoA is determined on the basis of the parameters of hazard, vulnerability and exposure, determined at Level 0 and 1. Depending on the CoA resulting from the analysis of level 2, others levels are defined as follows: • Level 3: preliminary assessment to understand, together with the analyzes produced at Level 1, if it is necessary to proceed with the detailed analyses of Level 4; • Level 4: accurate assessment according to the current Italian code (NTC18) (Italian Ministry of Public Works, 2018); Level 5 is currently not covered in the Guidelines. It applies to bridges considered to be of significant importance within the network. For these bridges, it is useful to carry out more sophisticated analyses such as those of resilience of the branch of the road network and / or of the transport system of which the bridge is part, evaluating the transport