A network device can automatically select an execution plan from a set of possible execution plans that cause a first set of traffic assignments in a network to be changed to a second set of traffic assignments. A traffic assignment indicates assignments of the traffic to one or more tunnels, internal routes and/or peer links to be utilized for routing traffic received at provider edge routers through a network to prefixes. A traffic assignment can have various parameters such as bandwidth, transmission costs etc. Each execution plan has one or more steps, and each step has one or more traffic assignment changes progressing from the first set of traffic assignments to the second set of traffic assignments. The network device can automatically select an execution plan based on an evaluation metric determined for each execution plan. The evaluation metric can be a cost based metric or a quality based metric.