Abstract. In optical networks, traffic demands often demonstrate periodic nature for which time-overlapping property can be utilized in routing and wavelength assignment (RWA). A RWA problem for scheduled lightpath demands (SLDs) has been solved by combinatorial optimal solution (COS) and graph coloring, or heuristic sequential RWA (sRWA). Such methods are very complex and incurs large computational overhead. In this paper, we propose an efficient RWA algorithm to utilize the time disjoint property as well as space disjoint property through fast grouping of SLDs. The computer simulation shows that our proposed algorithm indeed achieves up to 54% faster computation with similar number of wavelengths than the existing heuristic sRWA algorithm.