Development of a bridge rating tool for optimised multi-hazard life-cycle-based maintenance

Providing and maintaining a resilient and sustainable transport infrastructure is a main priority nowadays for a solid economic development. While infrastructure plays an important role in the economies of most countries, it also represents a considerable cost. The financial consequences of neglecting maintenance are often only seen in terms of reduced asset life and premature asset replacement expenses. However, more importantly, neglecting maintenance implies increased costs of operating facilities and waste of financial resources when failure/out-ofservice occurs. In Italy, recently observed bridge collapses have put pressure on management authorities to set up procedures for prioritisation of asset maintenance, that led to the introduction in 2020 of specific guidelines on risk classification and management, safety assessment and monitoring of existing bridges. However, because of the qualitative description of the risk foreseen by such guidelines, management entities are not able to produce fine-grained prioritisation rankings of bridges within a network. This paper presents the development of a bridge rating application, using C# language, integrating the results of guideline-based rankings with those obtained through available or newly proposed risk-based quantitative methods. The goal is to provide operational support to the relevant bridge management stakeholders, with more refined prioritisation rankings that become particularly helpful when dealing with large bridge stocks.