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With the successful introduction of reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs) and related technologies, WDM networks are now growing in the number of optical nodes, wavelengths, and lambda services supported. In addition, shared path protection mechanisms — whereby lambda services are allowed to share protection wavelength channels — are possible at the optical (WDM) layer. Efficient strategies must be devised to both determine the set of services that must share a common protection wavelength channel and assign wavelengths to every service. One objective of these strategies is to minimize the total number of wavelength converters (WCs), which are required every time the wavelength continuity constraint cannot be met. This paper presents a scalable and efficient heuristic, whose goal is to minimize the number of WCs in resilient WDM networks supporting static sets of shared path protection lambda services. The heuristic comprises a set of polynomial algorithms that are executed sequentially to obtain a sub-optimal solution. In small size instances of the problem, the heuristic is compared against the optimal solution obtained from ILP formulation. For large size instances — tens of thousands of lambda services and hundreds of nodes — the heuristic yields an average number of WCs that is close to be linear in the number of services, despite the fact that the wavelength sharing factor increases.