Resource allocation in WDM networks, under both the static and dynamic traffic models have been widely investigated. However, in recent years there has been a growing number of applications with periodic bandwidth demands. Resources for such applications can be scheduled in advance, leading to a more efficient utilization of available network capacity. The setup and teardown times of the scheduled demands may be fixed, or may be allowed to slide within a larger window. A number of optimal integer linear program (ILP) solutions for the first problem (fixed setup/teardown times) have been presented in the literature. In this paper we present two new ILP formulations for the more general sliding scheduled traffic model, where the setup and teardown times may vary within a specified range. We first consider wavelength convertible networks and then extend our model to networks without wavelength conversion. Our ILP formulations jointly optimize the problem of scheduling the demands (in time) and allocating resources for the scheduled lightpaths. The fixed window model can be treated as a special case of our formulations. Our formulations are able to generate optimal solutions for practical sized networks. For larger networks, we have proposed a fast two-step optimization process. The first step schedules the demands optimally in time, so that the amount of overlap is minimized. The second step uses a connection holding time aware heuristic to perform routing and wavelength assignment for the scheduled demands.