Bridge Management System for Historic Infrastructural Heritage

Aggressive environmental conditions and increasing traffic volume can cause significant deterioration to many bridges. Following some accidents, including the collapse of the Morandi bridge, in the 2020 Italian Government adopted “Guidelines on risk classification and management, safety assessment and monitoring of existing bridges”. In the last few years Bridge Management System (BMS) have been increasingly used by infrastructure owners, especially those systems, based on stochastic methods, which make it possible to define a condition ratio (CR) starting from periodic inspections of bridges, during which a specialist identifies defects and evaluates them according to specific guidelines. Various countries have developed their BMS, however most of them utilize a two-dimensional approach. A BIM model completed with information data is useful to manage a specific asset during its life cycle. The present study purposes the investigation of a possible BIM-Use for an infrastructure owner, precisely the monitoring of the degradation conditions of existing railway bridges. The functions of an existing software aimed at the above purposes have been implemented in a BIM environment. At the end of the process a maintenance technician can valorize each founded defect in a BIM environment, once all defects are been censued, and run the automatic computation of the two index that describe the bridge conditions. The new software features were implemented in a combination of Python code scripts developed in a visual programming language and linked to spreadsheets with many queries written in SQL language.