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Hybrid electric vehicles are today being touted as the answer to the depleting petroleum reserves, growing concerns for environmental protection and in meeting stricter emission norms [4]. The fact that these vehicles offer a marked improvement in the fuel economy of the vehicle and that their usage does not call for any infrastructural change as in the case of pure electric vehicles, is bound to make these vehicles play a significant role. This paper describes an alternate charging system for a series hybrid two wheeler, using the traditional 12V starter motor [7]. The paper presents MATLAB simulation results to compare the variation in vehicle battery voltage in case a single battery is used with a 12V starter system as compared to a combination of a lead acid and Li-ion batteries. The second part of the paper describes a controlled power distribution system to optimize the power distribution during the charging cycle for the same vehicle [6].

Present day automobiles make use of a large number of Electronic control Units (ECU), for a varied purposes such as engine control, power steering control, transmission control etc. Each of these ECU's has its own processors, the selection of which is made on the basis of the particular task to be handled. All the more, these processors are interconnected by the use of one or more communication protocol such as CAN, LIN etc. This gives us a platform for the implementation of distributed processing in the system. Implementation of distributed processing has a number of advantages such as increase in processing power, reduction in wire complexity, reuse of same hardware module for different tasks, decrease in the processor size required as compared to when the entire processing was to be carried out by an individual processor and better and more complex problem solving tools can now be implemented.