This article presents a standardized optical network control plane

highlights the challenges and choicesthat need to be addressed in developing the control plane for optical transport networks.The optical control plane isdecomposed into the fundamental processes of neighbour discovery

service discovery

connection control

and topol-ogy/resource discovery. Different network organizations and partitioning result in several different automated provisioning models:softpermanent circuit

the user network interface and peer.This is the foundation of IP-Centric control and managementfor optical transport networks. This article also introduces the new generation of intelligent optical networks byCIENA.It is characterized by large capacity ofoptical switchs

automated topology discovery

port-to-port circuit pro-vision and dynamic distribution of bandwidth

which will greatly improve the Qos of data and circuit.The new genera-tion of intelligent optical networks is the best choice of switching and transport for Backbone and Metro networks.