Assessing component impairing at mission level

Whilst the amount of debris around the Earth steadily increases, the danger of collisions between debris and operating man-made space systems becomes a major issue. Whilst on the one hand fine physical simulation allows predicting accurately failure occurrences or manoeuvre consequences, and on the other hand fine behavioural models allow apprehending the services expected from a given system as an organisation of functions performed by various agents, it is difficult to have both approaches work together. This paper proposes a bridge between both approaches by developing a model describing in a unified way dependencies, redundancies, and interactions between physical components concurring to ensure elementary functions of a system, and shows how this approach was applied to the assessment of remedial measures to space debris issues for space assets.