A network design apparatus includes an information acquiring unit acquiring optical network information, a section dividing unit dividing an optical network into linear sections, a combination candidate determining unit determining candidates for combinations of various kinds of optical transmission equipment to be placed in each station in each of the linear sections, a noise amount upper limit determining unit determining an upper limit to the amount of noise allowed for each wavelength path, and an equipment placement unit solving an integer programming problem having an objective function that minimizes the cost of the optical transmission equipment and OEO regenerators, subject to the constraints that one optical transmission equipment combination is selected for each linear section and that the number of OEO regenerators necessary for each wavelength path is determined by the cumulative amount of noise of the wavelength path and the noise upper limit determined for the wavelength path.