Italy’s national rail operator RTF has chosen a team made up of contractors Impresa Pizzarotti and Saipem to construct a high-speed rail link and station in Florence.

The €1.1bn project will involve excavating a 7km tunnel and building Firenze Belfiore station, designed by Foster + Partners and consulting engineer Arup.

The new line is intended to separate high-speed inter-city trains from the Tuscan regional network.

According to Saipem, the improvement to Florence’s rail system will contribute to the development of sustainable mobility. It will also advance one of the EU’s trans-European networks, along with the Milan-Bologna and Milan-Verona high-speed links, which it also worked on.

Pizzarotti said in a press statement that its AI monitoring system would be used in controlling the tunnel boring machine.

Carlo Luzzatto, the chief executive of Pizzarotti, said: “The Florence rail link will benefit from the powerful monitoring platform produced by the partnership between Pizzarotti and [Italian tech company] Seco. AI, machine learning, real time and digital modelling are the keywords of the smart infrastructure.”