Assessment of existing reinforced‐concrete bridges under road‐traffic loads according to the new Italian guidelines

Abstract The Italian “Guidelines for risk classification, safety assessment and structural health monitoring of existing bridges” were recently approved to define the technical principles for the management of the national network of existing bridges. This is a powerful tool to establish a common framework for risk mitigation and safety assessment of reinforced concrete (R.C.) bridges that represent most of the existing stock. The guidelines are code‐based and allow practitioners to deal with the concepts behind the modern design in terms of target reliability and partial safety factors as well as properly developed traffic‐load models. This paper illustrates a novel methodology for safety assessment and performance class definition of existing R.C. bridges according to the guidelines. A prestressed R.C. bridge is finally presented as a case study to show the completeness of the procedure.