Cross‐National Bridge Management Systems: A Geomatics Framework for Italian and Swiss Authorities

Effective bridge management requires structured methods that integrate infor-mation gained through visual inspections, non-destructive tests or monitoring sys-tems to prioritize maintenance activities on bridges at a territorial level. The Italianand Swiss authorities offer different perspectives on maintenance prioritization, withItaly emphasizing multi-level classification and flexible data integration for risk as-sessment, and Switzerland relying on condition assessment and a centralized BMSincluding damage predictive capabilities to determine maintenance policy, whileminimizing the long-term costs. Both approaches highlight the need for interopera-ble digital solutions to collect, analyse and process large amount of heterogeneousdata. In addition, recent federal regulations enforce the "open by default" principle,promoting transparency, participation, and innovation using open-source softwareto fulfil Public Authority tasks. Moving from these considerations, the study proposesa modular framework for bridge management that includes inventory and data man-agement, inspection workflows, risk analysis, predictive monitoring, GIS/BIM inte-gration, intervention planning, and regulatory compliance. By leveraging opensource and widely used tools, the framework improves data accessibility, interoper-ability, and decision-making efficiency. A comparative analysis with existing propri-etary solutions highlights large possibilities of improvement in terms of adaptabilityand integration, underscoring the need for a flexible, standardized digital approachto bridge infrastructure management.