The popularity of high-capacity communication services such as video streaming and cloud computing has accelerated the growth in IP traffic. In order to effectively manage and maintain networking systems, various intelligent technologies based on software-defined networking (SDN) have been widely studied. An SDN system that offers flexible optical path management exploiting optical performance monitoring, digital signal processing, and resource allocation is expected to realize higher capacity networks by lowering margins needed to offset system uncertainty. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of optical path management schemes based on machine learning.