Two years ago, Dennis Sadlowski took over as CEO of Alpharetta-based Siemens Energy & Automation.

The company, which is part of Siemens AG, the global engineering and electronics conglomerate, has more than 10,000 U.S. employees, with more than 3,000 based in the metro area.

Courtesy of Dennis Sadlowski\ (ENLARGE)

Dennis Sadlowski, the CEO of Siemens Energy & Automation, says Atlanta has made progress in controlling traffic, but a higher population won't help.

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Sadlowski's company is focused on increasing industrial productivity. For instance, it automates close to 80 percent of the U.S. Postal Service's sorting and delivery system, he said.

A niche and growing field is traffic systems engineering — getting vehicles from Point A to Point B as smoothly as possible. It's something near and dear to most Atlantans' hearts.

Sadlowski was interviewed by telephone from Germany.

Q: What are you doing in Germany?

A: This is the global headquarters [of Siemens]. We're going through some business reviews and planning for our future. I'm here quite a bit; there's a lot of change in the company.

We're in an internal structural change, organizing the company into three primary areas: energy, health care and [industrial systems] where we have a number of key fields.

Q: You talk about factory and infrastructure improvements. Is regulating and controlling traffic like doing it for a factory?

A: One-hundred percent. You take sensing applications, which we do by monitoring traffic flow. You then need to put control applications in, allowing traffic to move at different paces, whether it's on-boarding to the freeway system or the timing of traffic lights. You need to keep refining that based on a fairly dynamic environment. You're right, it's similar to working a large factory, trying to optimize the production.

Q: Here we are in 2008. We should be driving the Jetsons' cars but we're getting stopped every other light. Have cities and states not bought in as much as they should have to synchronization?

A: A lot of places have reasonably high traffic light synchronization, but in many of those the investment made is one based on manual points of time where someone would go out and re-

assess the flow on a manual basis and then says ... here's the timing, here's the synchronization. Today, the technology exists using adaptive control, so it's real time assessing what really's going on Friday the 27th between 3 and 5 o'clock. You can then make adaptive changes with light synchronization and maximize the amount of traffic flowing down a particular roadway.

Q: Are there actually cameras at intersections looking to determine whether it's worse than normal and the lights need to be recalibrated?

A: Exactly. It's adaptive based on real-time data. We have cameras or sensors that monitor what's going on and can resynchronize the lighting. We did a pilot in Houston that showed up to 25 percent improvement in arterial traffic times with the reduction in the stops.

Q: How much better are we at monitoring and controlling traffic than we were five or 10 years ago.

A: There's a number of areas and cities, Atlanta included, that are making progress to manage traffic. But at the same time, more people are moving to the cities.

Q: But doesn't alleviating one traffic problem — like letting a light go 30 seconds longer to prevent starting and stopping — create another problem?

A: Not if it's done well and not if the monitoring points in the system are done in a way that takes a reasonably holistic look at roadways.

Q: Is that monitoring ultimately by a person sitting in a control center or does a computer do that?

A: The adaptive control system is monitored by software that has an algorithm that automatically readjusts the timing based on what's happening in that part of town at that time of the day.

Q: How does the system know what's going on?

A: Generally, it's cameras monitoring the number of cars. That information is run through software that will sum up the various values and make the adjustments.

Q: What are some of your other products?

A: You probably also saw the work London has done to clean up the air. Essentially, they have a tariff on entering the central part of the city with an automobile. They are charging people with a system that Siemens helped to provide — some of the technology, it takes camera pictures of your license plate and it sees who is coming in.

Q: It seems like good monitoring, but it raises some privacy concerns.

A: In the case of London, it was kind of the city's call. While we provide a lot of security-based technology, we are providing technology that is assisting in the way of productivity. Frequently, there's a trade-off there in the way of productivity and security that one has to take into account.

Q: What drives you crazy as a driver, your pet peeves?

A: These days I look around at the number of people who are not concentrating on driving, who have some kind of electronic device or the newspaper. That's something that worries me.