"Optical networks providing services to users such as companies, governmental institutions, and private citizens, have been expanding at a dramatic rate in recent years in order to support the corresponding explosive growth of bandwidth-rich applications and are considered as one of the critical infrastructures of a country. As in next-generation optical networks the signal will remain in the optical domain for portion of the path or even for the entire path, making them more vulnerable to physical layer attacks, security issues in these networks are of paramount importance. The proposed project “Security-enHancement of optIcal nEtwork Logical Design” (SHIELD) is a research effort focusing on the logical design of secure next-generation optical networks. The logical design problem of optical networks is referred to the process of finding paths and wavelengths (lightpaths) to requested connections. This problem, known as the Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) is considered as one of the most important problems in optical network design. Specifically, the main objective of this project is to design and evaluate novel algorithms that range from Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to several heuristic algorithms for the planning and operational phases of future optical networks, able to support different data rates and node architectures that will focus on providing flexibility in the utilization of resources to minimize the CAPital EXpenditures (CAPEX) and Operational EXpenditures (OPEX) costs, such as monetary cost and power consumption, while offering security capabilities against physical layer attacks. Attack models with random nature will also be investigated and techniques to incorporate these models in optimization algorithms will be proposed. Finally, this set of algorithms will be integrated in a software tool that can be utilized by network engineers and researchers to more efficiently and securely design their optical networks."