As part of an integrated risk management process of road infrastructures, the Asset Management Systems of existing bridges play an increasingly significant role, in order to define the programmatic strategies of the road owners or managers.

In this perspective, the introduction of the new Italian "Guidelines for risk classification and management, the safety assessment and the monitoring of existing bridges" represents a strong innovation. These Guidelines, based on a modern risk-based approach, call all road managers to activate its procedures for the knowledge and the classification of the state of their structural assets, identifying, at the same time, the needs in terms of maintenance, works and interventions. The results of the application of such Guidelines also represent the basis for defining, through the tools of the Integrated Management Systems, an optimal operational and financial planification of interventions, to be carried out to maximize the safety of the existing bridges.

In this paper, after having focused on the importance of the application of the Guidelines as procedures of the Safety Management Systems of road network managers, the significance of the completeness of the cognitive process, provided by Guidelines for the correct definition of the priorities and the planification of the more suitable intervention aimed to mitigate the seismic risk, has been illustrated. In particular, the activities for the detection of the aspects related to the seismic vulnerability have been identified as the key process in the context of the Safety Management Systems used by the road managers.

In the second part of the paper, the aspects related to the adoption, by all the road managers operating in a certain territorial area, of the approach defined by the Guidelines have been analyzed. This is fundamental in order to improve the network safety performance for the areas characterized by a greater seismic hazard and for the most strategic and/or heavily trafficked road infrastructures.