Thanks to the development of the automatic and distributed control plane (ASON and GMPLS standards), optical transport networks are able to provide bandwidth-on-demand services quickly and efficiently. But for these services to be really interesting to users, the capability of seamlessly operating the network across multiple administrative domains should be developed. Multi-domain routing in ASON is a new challenging topic, especially if the target is a scalable solution. This article investigates, in particular, the application of aggregation topology methods to the representation of network domains in a dynamic scenario. These methods, initially devised for the ATM networks, can be extended to ASON/GMPLS, as recommended by the Optical Interworking Forum (OIF). Topology aggregation limits the amount of topology information distributed throughout the network and the bandwidth occupation for control plane signaling, improving scalability. Besides this partial distribution of information, in a real network the update of the distributed topology databases to the changes of state is not instantaneous, but it occurs with some delay. In this article, we evaluate the combined effect of topology aggregation and non-instantaneous topology information update on the routing performance of a multi-domain network. This study assumes that information updating is periodic, with different durations of the period. Moreover, we will refer to the topology-aggregation methods proposed by OIF (full mesh and symmetric star) in addition to a hybrid method proposed in this article.