Towards Quantitative Prioritization Schemes for Bridge Portfolios in Italy

The Italian government has recently instated guidelines on risk classification, management, safety assessment and monitoring of existing bridges. Such guidelines can also be used as a rapid prioritisation method that, based on the limited information available about assets in the inventory, allows the identification of bridges requiring special attention in the form of inspection, detailed analysis, monitoring and possible retrofitting. However, these guidelines are based on qualitative indicators that can produce overly conservative results. In this paper, the recent Italian guidelines are explored and a quantitative partial modification is proposed, based on average annual loss prioritization results from detailed risk assessment. The proposed modification is evaluated on a case study of 617 reinforced concrete bridges, using seismic hazard to demonstrate its potential large-scale implementation. The results show a notable improvement in the identification of high-risk assets in the portfolio, encouraging the adoption of similar strategies to other hazards and bridge typologies, with a view to multi-hazard and data-driven quantitative prioritization schemes for the Italian territory.