Techniques and a control architecture (apparatus and logic) are provided for an adaptive hybrid DWDM-aware computation scheme. The architecture is one that is a hybrid of a centralized control scheme and a distributed control scheme that performs adaptive physical impairment computations for an optical network. A central control server is connected to multiple client control devices each of which resides in a node in a dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) optical network, wherein each client control device is part of an optical control plane associated with the optical network. The control server obtains data for path route analysis from the client control devices. The control server then determines optical feasibility of at least one path route from a source node to a destination node from optical parametric information based on the data obtained from multiple client control devices and without real-time communication between the central control server and the multiple client control devices while performing the optical feasibility computations.