Systemic design of a bridge demountability, inspectability and maintainability, Proceeding for fib International Symposium on Conceptual Design of Structures Oslo – 2023.

Nowadays, there is a strong attention onto the study of modern buildings and infrastructures to define a paradigm for conceptual design that meets criteria such as demountability, inspectability, and maintainability. Concepts that are common, from the earliest stages, in mechanical engineering and industrial design but still not fully considered in the design of civil infrastructures. These criteria are synergic with modern requirements such as resilience, sustainability, circular economy, and lifecycle analysis. This paper presents the results of an applicative research based on the design of a pedestrian bridge whose concept starts from the above stated principles. Just like a coffee pot, design stems from creativity but is addressed by the above requirements to provide a systemic arrangement of components and simplify the lifelong management stage. By varying the importance of the single criteria, the analysis leads to different results and structural shapes in a range that goes from static redundancy to controlled lability. The paper focuses on the role of demountability, inspectability, maintainability as well as resilience, sustainability, circular economy, and lifecycle analysis, in the context of the conceptual design of a pedestrian bridge project and establishes a set of guidelines for the design principles deriving from this innovative approach. The proposed methodology is the systemic design applied using macro-flow diagrams and synthesis maps that are visual representations of processes, key concepts, relationships between them and their effects on results. Main findings and observations regard the efficiency of this method in design early stages as well as the simplicity of application in the study of project variations and interactions between the disciplines involved.