Achim Autenrieth and Jörg-Peter Elbers lead AI-driven optical transport short course at OFC 2026
Session will explore T-SDN and operations-ready AI, from open interfaces and streaming telemetry to LLMs, agentic automation and ChatOps
- Speakers: Achim Autenrieth, senior director of advanced technology at Adtran; Jörg-Peter Elbers, VP of advanced technologies at Adtran
- Topics: Symposium: AI-driven optical transport networks: architectures, applications and intelligent automation
- When: Monday, March 16, 8:30 a.m. PT
- Where: OFC 2026, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, California, USA https://www.ofcconference.org
As optical transport networks become more software-driven and disaggregated, classical SDN concepts are being extended to support faster service turn-up, stronger fault detection and analysis and more efficient resource optimization. At the same time, AI is shifting from experimentation to operations, with ML pipelines, LLMs and policy-controlled agents increasingly used to translate intent, automate workflows and support human-in-the-loop operations.
This OFC short course will show how T-SDN and AI-enabled automation can improve operations. It covers the core T-SDN architecture, data models and open interfaces, plus the role of streaming telemetry in enabling intent-driven control. The course will also explore real-world use cases across open line systems, disaggregated WDM and multi-layer packet-optical and IP-over-WDM networks, with a focus on operations-ready AI for predictive maintenance, anomaly localization and policy-controlled agent workflows.