Proactively managing computed optical restoration paths

A method comprising steps of:

• continuously tracking health of services in an optical network, monitoring how many restoration paths remain accessible to an on-box control plane, and quality of any remaining restoration paths;
• managing restoration paths installed on a plurality of nodes in the optical network to one or more of remove unavailable restoration paths and add new available restoration paths for any of the services in the optical network, including maintaining for each service a restoration path set installed on a head-end node of the plurality of nodes and dynamically updating the restoration path set to remove unavailable restoration paths and add newly computed restoration paths;
• responsive to detecting one or more at-risk services, for the one or more at-risk services, performing computation of new viable restoration paths and a multi-stage policy-based ranking of the new restoration paths for the one or more at-risk services;
• and
• for the one or more at risk services, pushing the ranked new viable restoration paths to the on-box control plane based on thresholds, including refreshing the restoration path set installed at the head-end node so that an on-box restoration engine has validated restoration paths available before exhausting a current set of restoration paths for the service.

An apparatus comprising:

• one or more processors, a network interface communicatively coupled to an on-box control plane associated with an optical network, and memory storing instructions that, when executed, cause the one or more processors to
• continuously track health of services in the optical network, monitoring how many restoration paths remain accessible to an on-box control plane, and quality of any remaining restoration paths;
• managing restoration paths installed on a plurality of nodes in the optical network to one or more of remove unavailable restoration paths and add new available restoration paths for any of the services in the optical network, including maintaining for each service a restoration path set installed on a head-end node of the plurality of nodes and dynamically updating the restoration path set to remove unavailable restoration paths and add newly computed restoration paths;
• responsive to detecting one or more at-risk services, for the one or more at-risk services, performing computation of new viable restoration paths and a multi-stage policy-based ranking of the new restoration paths for the one or more at-risk services;
• and
• for the one or more at risk services, pushing the ranked new viable restoration paths to the on-box control plane based on thresholds, including refreshing the restoration path set installed at the head-end node so that an on-box restoration engine has validated restoration paths available before exhausting a current set of restoration paths for the service.