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<p>In this paper we compare the results of different methodologies of inspections, made on the deck of a concrete bridge located near Cagliari, along the SS 195 road to Capoterra. From a strategic point of view this structure plays a key role ensuring direct connections from Cagliari to different structures related to industrial and local productions and to an important touristic district. Aim of our work is to obtain a real measure of the vulnerability through two procedures and compare them. The first one is based only on visual inspection while the second one realizes a measure in time of the vulnerability through chemical and physical processes focusing on the carbonation depth.</p><p>With the first procedure we manipulated the data obtained by visual inspection with fuzzy logic, thus using mathematical and logic functions to transform linguistic assessments, inherently subjective, into a numerical result, thus objective, representing the failure probability. This is derived from visual inspection and it’s then compared to the results obtained through the evaluation of the carbonation process in the concrete beams of the bridge. The goal is to verify the reliability of visual inspection through the comparison of the data obtained with the two different approaches and trace a methodology in order to reduce the number of invasive actions and their cost.</p>

This paper shows the comparisons between different methods of visual inspection used in European Countries. These methodologies are applied to the deck bridge located near Cagliari, along the SS 195 road to Capoterra. From a strategic point of view, this structure plays a key role ensuring a direct connection to different structures related to industrial and local productions and to an important touristic district. This is a prestressed concrete bridge in an aggressive marine environment, which in October 2008 was hit by a flood that caused subsidence in the foundations. The aim of our inspection is to obtain a real measure of the vulnerability through different procedures and to determine which is the best method able to give objective results.

Fuzzy logic applied to the visual inspection of existing buildings has been proposed in relation to simple structures. Isostatic structures are characterized by a unique and known collapse mechanism, which does not vary with geometry or load change. In this paper we apply fuzzy logic to visual inspection for complex structures such as hyperstatic ones in which the collapse mechanism depends not only on the geometry but also on the size and disposition of loads. The goal of this paper is to give relevant weight, in the fuzzy analysis, not only to the single expression of degradation, due to its localization within the element, but also to the structural element itself by assigning a different resistance to the various elements. The underlying aim of the proposed method is to manage, evaluate, and process all the information coming from visual inspections in order to realize a management information system for the evaluation of the safety level of even complex structures.