ABSTRACT
Italy is the European country with the highest number of railway tunnels whose cover about 10% of the entire infrastructure. Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI) is the company in charge of almost all the Italian railway network management. It performs maintenace activities on over 1.500 km of tunnels, which have been built until 150 years ago and are still in service.
In order to perfom the maintenance of this amount of tunnels and achieve effective maintenance plan, the assessment of tunnels conservation status is necessary.
In this respect, RFI developed the “TDMS - Tunnel damage management system”, an experimental method to perform the surveys of tunnels and to evaluate the conservation status of these.
The paper will illustrates the criteria underlying the TDMS method, the main features of the technology and how the conservation status of tunnels is defined.
