Many countries of the Western world have made significant investments in infrastructure development in the ’60s-’70s and before. The management of the existing bridges is complex and requires very articulated and dynamic activities, made even more complicated by the large number of authorities dealing with this issue. After some catastrophic collapses, these activities have been systematically launched in some countries, even if significant delays are recorded in others. A task group of the IABSE Italian Group (IABSE-IT) has been activated to analyze the Italian guidelines for the assessment of the existing bridges and suggest potential improvements. To this aim, a survey of guidelines used in other countries for the management of existing bridge stock has been carried out. In this paper, the several approaches identified through the survey are preliminarily discussed and compared with the Italian one.
Zoratto et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: