Condition assessment by visual inspection for a bridge management system

The development of a reliable bridge management system (BMS) constitutes a formidable engineering challenge due to both the multiobjective nature of the task and the large amount of information to be considered in formulating the required automated judgments. This article deals with a procedure for bridge condition assessment by visual inspection developed during the planning and preliminary design of the BMS for the public railway networks in Italy. The main modules adopted in the procedure are: bridge inventory, computer-aided visual inspection, automated defect catalog, and priority-ranking procedure. The probabilistic models used to calibrate the condition evaluation algorithm are discussed. Different levels of deficiency have been individuated for each class of bridge structure belonging to the managed stock. The procedure allows comparison and relative ranking of deficiency conditions across different types of bridge structures. The results of a visual inspection campaign conducted for a set of bridges with different structural characteristics are reported and evaluated within the framework of the developed BMS.