Synthesis of Galactic Stellar Populations and Expected Constraints from Infrared Surveys

Abstract

Models of population synthesis for the Galaxy have been developed in order to understand galactic structure and evolution. They allow to test scenarii of evolution by comparisons between model predictions and observed distributions. Forthcoming near-infrared surveys will enormously increase the amount of information about the distributions of late type stars in the Galaxy. We show here how population synthesis models will help to analyse these surveys and to interprete them in terms of mass function, star formation history and stellar evolution.