A displacement-based procedure for seismic assessment of reinforced concrete bridges

In Italy, as well as in other seismic countries, many viaducts along the highways were built in the Sixties without antiseismic criteria. Moreover, some of these bridges are fundamental after a seismic event for allowing the civil protection interventions and first aid organizations. Therefore, they are needed to be assessed against seismic risk. In this paper we present a displacement-based seismic assessment procedure for reinforced concrete multi-span bridges in transverse response which gives reliable results and, at the same time, is sufficiently simple to be applied on a large population of bridges in a short time thanks to an ad hoc developed numerical tool.