Benefits of decreasing the uncertainty in the current bridge inspection practice

AbstractNumerous bridges worldwide have surpassed their service-life. To ensure the user safety, visual inspections are commonly carried out with the consequent assignment of Defect Grades. On their basis, simplified risk evaluations and maintenance intervention prioritization are formulated. Per the inherent nature of visual inspections, these ones include two kinds of uncertainty: interpretation-related and representation-related one. If to attempt to reduce their influence in the inspective process, the former, being an intrinsic feature of inspections performed by humans, could not be tackled. The latter, instead, can be decreased on the basis of a novel semantics-based inspective methodology. On the grounds of a large set of real-life inspections outputs, the present article measures the inspection quality improvement following said uncertainty reduction. This was achieved through the Expected Utility Theory in terms of utility and costs. On the grounds of these two, a novel Uncertainty-induced Cost curve allows the assessment of the cost evolution as a function of the weight of the representation-related uncertainty. The proposed semantics-based inspective methodology represents an improvement over the current-day directly assigned condition grading one, thus improving the efficiency of structural reliability assessments. This leads to an improved prioritization of bridge maintenance interventions and to an increased user safety.Keywords: Bridgebridge maintenancestructural reliability assessmentdamage assessmentinspectionstructural safetyservice lifebridge inspection quality AcknowledgementsThe work presented in this paper was carried out under the research agreement between Autostrade per l’Italia (ASPI) and the University of Trento. This research has been supported also by Ministry of Education University and Research MIUR PON RI 2014-2020 Program (Project MITIGO, ARS01_00964), Consorzio della Rete dei Laboratori Universitari di Ingegneria Sismica e Strutturale ReLUIS Ponti 2021- 2022 ‘Implementation of provisions of DM 578/2020’, and DPC-ReLUIS 2022-2024 ‘Monitoring and satellite data’.Disclosure statementDaniele Zonta reports financial support was provided by University of Trento. Daniele Zonta reports a relationship with Government of Italy Ministry of Education University and Research that includes: funding grants. Daniele Zonta reports a relationship with Consorzio della Rete dei Laboratori Universitari di Ingegneria Sismica e Strutturale that includes funding grants.