The Guidelines for Risk Classification and Management, Safety Assessment, and Monitoring of Existing Bridges, released in 2020 by the Italian Ministry of Infrastructures and Transport, promote the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) environment as one of the main tools to achieve informed risk mitigation of infrastructures. To date, BIM environments are often only used as repositories of information from different entities involved in bridge design, management, and retrofitting. However, to achieve informed risk mitigation of bridges, the current BIM paradigms should be expanded by integrating new typologies of data, such as those from Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems, and functionalities, such as the ability to process stored data directly within the BIM environments. In this light, this paper presents a BIM-based approach conceived to achieve comprehensive assessment and management of the risk conditions and structural performance of bridges. To this end, specific algorithms have been implemented into the selected BIM environment to perform tasks such as assessing the preliminary risk level of a bridge according to the methodology proposed by the Italian Guidelines, evaluating the outcomes from visual inspections to estimate its defect level, storing and processing data from SHM systems installed on the structure, and more. The paper also presents the first application of the proposed BIM-based approach to a post-tensioned box girder bridge belonging to the Italian road network.
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