Creation of a synthetic population of space debris with heuristic methods

Matching a simulated space debris population with the real one is a complex problem. There are several reasons: the main one is the lack of knowledge of the events that occurred in space during the past years such as the number of fragmentations that took place, their nature or intensity. Another reason is the weakness of our numerical models, not only by the assumed hypothesis, but also by the limitation of the computational means.

In this work we propose to introduce different techniques to constrain the created synthetic population of space debris. The final goal is to fit the created synthetic population with a reference population of space debris by comparing their global statistical characteristics.


The previously mentioned techniques come from the field of the microsimulation, and consist of using heuristic algorithms such as the Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) method or the Genetic Algorithm (GA).

We provide qualitative and quantitative measures of how they reduce the discrepancies between the simulated synthetic population of space debris and the population chosen as reference.