PSI - Issue 84

Giuseppe Alessandro Battista et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 84 (2026) 694–701

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2025). Furthermore, risk-based multi-objective frameworks now allow for cross-asset budget planning, which has been shown to significantly reduce the number of high-risk assets across a city’s entire database (Poudel et al., 2022). These integrated frameworks are also expanding their scope to include diverse infrastructure categories, such as urban water systems, to ensure a truly holistic and resilient regional planning strategy (Maumela et al., 2025). While ANSFISA has adopted its own internal model based on technical-regulatory criteria for oversight, individual Operators often employ highly diverse methodologies built on local operational experience. This study aims to critically analyze these varying approaches, highlighting the points of contact and the areas of divergence between the institutional and operational decision-making levels. The analysis incorporates advanced multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques, such as the integrated SWARA and MARCOS approach, to assess safety risks in environments characterized by high uncertainty (Jafarzadeh Ghoushchi et al., 2023). The research also explores the cutting edge of resilience analysis through computer-aided simulations capable of forecasting infrastructure behavior under extreme disaster scenarios, providing essential data for emergency planning and recovery (Li et al., 2025). This intelligent approach to health monitoring is also vital in the railway sector, where the identification of track defects using bibliometric and topic modeling tools is defining a new research agenda for smart infrastructure (Dinh et al., 2025). The ultimate goal of this research is to propose a simplified, yet technically robust, methodology to support prioritization choices in both the institutional (oversight) and operational (management) domains. By centering the approach on four key indicators - risk, severity, exposure, and impact - the proposed framework is designed to promote a much-needed integration between supervisory actions and infrastructure managers’ planning processes. This will provide a solid foundation for future methodological innovations, ultimately enhancing the overall resilience and reliability of the national road safety system. 2. The Italian regulatory and institutional framework The Italian regulatory framework for road and motorway infrastructure safety has evolved through a long process marked by a shift from a predominantly reactive maintenance approach to a more structured governance model. For most of the twentieth century, inspections and interventions were triggered by visible deterioration rather than by standardized, preventive, or risk-based procedures. Despite the presence of early technical provisions for periodic inspections, the lack of regulatory uniformity led to fragmented practices and wide discretion among operators. This framework proved inadequate in addressing the progressive aging of infrastructure largely built during the post-war period and approaching the end of its design service life. This regulatory fragmentation allowed for significant discrepancies between different operators, leading to a landscape where the quality and frequency of inspections were largely left to the discretion of the individual concessionaire or local entity. Such a model proved to be tragically inadequate when faced with the rapid aging of the national structural heritage, which was mostly built during the post war economic boom and was reaching the end of its theoretical service life. The structural fragility of this obsolete management model was dramatically exposed by the collapse of the Polcevera Viaduct in Genoa in August 2018. This event, known globally as the "Ponte Morandi tragedy", did not only represent a catastrophic engineering failure but served as a definitive turning point for the Italian institutional system, highlighting a systemic crisis in the supervision of strategic assets. The subsequent judicial and technical inquiries revealed a dangerous gap between the legal responsibilities of the operators and the effective capacity of the State to perform its monitoring functions. In response to this crisis, the legislator enacted the "Decreto Genova" Italia Law Decree 109/2018, which acted as the cornerstone for a total institutional restructuring. The most significant innovation of this decree was the establishment of the National Agency for the Safety of Railways and Road and Highway Structures (ANSFISA), which inherited and expanded the functions previously held in the road infrastructure field by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport. The birth of ANSFISA marks the transition from a "discretionary" oversight model to a "standardized" one, characterized by the centralization of technical authority and the introduction of a more rigorous, risk-based inspection regime. This new institutional architecture is designed to overcome the past fragmentation by imposing uniform guidelines - such as the "Linee Guida Ponti" - Bridge Guidelines - (Italy, 2022) which require all operators to adopt a multi-level approach to safety, ranging from basic censuses to complex numerical modeling and continuous structural health monitoring (De Bartolomeo et al., 2023; Renzi et al., 2023; Salvatore et al., 2024; Santarsiero et al., 2021). Consequently, the regulatory framework has shifted its focus from mere compliance with formal administrative duties