Data-informed Safety Assessment of Existing Transport Infrastructures

Bridges and tunnels are critical elements of the transport infrastructures network as they have often reached their design service life and are subject to unforeseen effects due to accidental actions, climate change or degradation processes. A thorough assessment process of the existing structures, aimed to support a preventive maintenance approach, is crucial at both European and national level. The assessment of existing concrete structures differs from the design of new assets, as the resisting models given are no longer valid with ongoing deterioration mechanisms. It is recommended to formulate the limit states considering the suspected damage mechanisms, with respect to adjusted target reliability levels in verifications. Existing assets also benefits from the availability of information related to the structural condition and the action effect on structures. As such, the EU Commission opened in 2019 the CSA call “Monitoring and safety of transport infrastructure”, granted to the IM‐SAFE project consortium and addressed in this paper, which specifically focuses on the proposal for further amendments to the existing EU standards on reliability assessment considering inspections, monitoring and testing and a new standard for preventive maintenance of transport infrastructure.