Static routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) is usually formulated as an optimization problem with the objective of minimizing wavelength channel usage or maximizing the number of connections established. In this paper, we formulate it as a priority and maximum revenue (MR) based optimization problem, which we believe will be more appealing to network operators. We describe an integer linear programming (ILP) solution which can be used to find the optimal solution for small networks. We also describe a simplified ILP (SILP) solution which can be used for both small and large networks. By means of computer simulations, the performance of the two ILP solutions are compared with the sequential R WA (SR) algorithm which we devise to mimic those algorithms commonly used for solving the maximum lightpath establishment (MLE) problem. Our results show that SILP outperforms SR significantly, and yields solutions close to the optimal solution obtained from ILP.