  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.
