Guidelines for the classification and management of risk, for the evaluation of safety and for the monitoring of existing bridges: differential analysis of experimental software applications for level 0,1,2 assessments

This paper investigates the application of the procedure described by the Italian Guideline for existing bridges and its related Operating Instructions for an existing bridge through three different IT (Information Technology) applications in order to evaluate its compliance with the regulation, and its effectiveness and efficiency, also in perspective of product certification. The work initially describes the result obtained applying manually the Guidelines with the aid of a non-commercial software developed at Sapienza for the definition of the level of defectiveness. Thus, the same procedure is repeated using two open-source commercial software, Inspicio and InBee which allow to operate within a Bridge Management System framework. Finally, a differential analysis among the three analyses is performed, highlighting the differences and the main characteristics of the software for the definition of the level of defectiveness, which is crucial for determining the attention class and to properly schedule the maintenance operations. Pros and cons of each individual software are detailed, followed by some suggestions for their potential improvement.