  Unit commitment and load dispatch problems are important and complex problems
in power system operations that have being traditionally solved separately. In
this paper, both problems are solved together without approximations or
simplifications. In fact, the problem solved has a massive amount of
grid-connected photovoltaic units, four pump-storage hydro plants as energy
storage units and ten thermal power plants, each with its own set of operation
requirements that need to be satisfied. To face such a complex constrained
optimization problem an adaptive repair method is proposed. By including a
given repair method itself as a parameter to be optimized, the proposed
adaptive repair method avoid any bias in repair choices. Moreover, this results
in a repair method that adapt to the problem and will improve together with the
solution during optimization. Experiments are conducted revealing that the
proposed method is capable of surpassing exact method solutions on a simplified
version of the problem with approximations as well as solve the otherwise
intractable complete problem without simplifications. Moreover, since the
proposed approach can be applied to other problems in general and it may not be
obvious how to choose the constraint handling for a certain constraint, a
guideline is provided explaining the reasoning behind. Thus, this paper open
further possibilities to deal with the ever changing types of generation units
and other similarly complex operation/schedule optimization problems with many
difficult constraints.
