Development and Implementation of Indicators to Assess Bridge Inspection Practices

All over Europe, the management of bridge integrity is carried out primarily through inspections that allow collecting information about the condition of bridges and support decisions about remedial interventions. Different approaches to bridge inspection have been developed among different states. The adoption of harmonized regulation and standards on bridge inspections at the European level would greatly benefit the efficiency of transport infrastructure. Several comparative studies have been conducted in the literature on inspection procedures in different European countries; however, most of them are incomplete due to lack of information or inaccessibility of sources. In this paper, a wide-ranging review of bridge inspection practices carried out in several European countries is provided. The novel contribution of this paper concerns the definition of a framework to classify and assess different bridge inspection procedures entailing the definition of different indicators relating to different aspects of the quality of data, specifically: completeness, timeliness, correctness related to human and technical factors, and level of data processing.