Application of Italian Guidelines for structural-foundational and seismic risk classification of bridges: the Fabre experience on a large bridge inventory

The recent issuance of Guidelines for the classification and management of risk, safety assessment, and monitoring of existing bridges has standardized the methodology for analyzing the safety and managing bridges at a national level. The Guidelines propose a multi-level analysis approach, where the assessment of structures is conducted with increasing levels of detail and complexity. This paper describes the work carried out by the Fabre Consortium, the Italian scientific alliance on risk assessment and monitoring of civil infrastructural systems, together with ANAS s.p.a., one of the major Italian road authorities, for the implementation of the Italian Guidelines to a large bridge inventory distributed over the Italian territory. This paper is specifically devoted to structural-foundational and seismic risk classification. The results of the application of the methodology to a large database is presented together with statistical analyses on parameters determining hazard, vulnerability and exposure and with the definition of the most recurrent typological bridge classes within the bridge inventory.