Downgrades of bridges and viaducts are increasingly frequent today. This is, in fact, the only way forward by the public authority or company managing a deteriorated infrastructure that needs urgent and radical structural interventions. However, structural restoration is almost always not immediate, both for technical and economic reasons.

Here then is the only way for responsible management of the road infrastructure that ensures its residual usability, excluding the extreme ratio of a total closure to heavy traffic, is to carry out a downgrade of the structure by redefining the maximum traffic load that can thus be locally lower than permitted by the highway code.

The downgrading measure, although congruous and effective, can be found to be not at all efficient in the real limitation of overloads in the absence of constant and systematic control, a control that is difficult to achieve both from the technical point of view – the verification of the weight of a vehicle is much more complex, for example than that of speed – than the socio-behavioral one, knowing that the prohibition of transit by limit mass prepared on site following the derating is very frequently disregarded. The dynamic weighing system (WIM – weigh in motion) BISON is therefore configured as strategic asset for the construction of an efficient downgrading of a road structure.

Its innovative technology allows real-time detection of all vehicle transits on the structure, identifying its configuration in terms of axles, calculating the actual weight on each wheel and cumulative on the axle, as well as the overall weight of the vehicle. The BISON system allows you to configure a load threshold after which the vehicle is identified as overload.

Thanks to its special OIML R 134 certification (International Organization of Legal Metrology) and the approval of the Ministry of Economic Development, the measurements detected by the BISON system are valid for sanctioning purposes.

Thanks to specific visual identification systems, the weigh in motion system BISON can return both the recovery of the license plate of the vehicle that a contextual image of the transit. The control interface of the system is made with the most modern WEB technologies that allow it to be used on the move by law enforcement agencies also via mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones. The installation of the BISON system requires minimal intervention on the roadway and of a simple single-phase 230V power supply with the commitment of only a few tens of watts of power. Furthermore,  BISON offers the advantage of being easily removed in the event of maintenance work such as asphalting, to then be relocated to its own site or even transferred to another site by reusing all parts not bound to the roadway. BISON will give unexpected results in a very short time both from a sanctioning and dissuasive, and therefore preventive, point of view, thus making downgrading a truly efficient strategy. The system therefore makes the real difference in the efficient management of the downgrading of a road infrastructure.