An expert system for flood management is developed for the flood control operation of a reservoir. The procedure uses both expert system tools and traditional computer programming techniques considering the complexity of the reservoir operation problem. The present work has been carried out in four phases, namely, flood estimation, flood simulation, reservoir operation, and expert system development. In the flood simulation phase, rainfall-runoff computation model, and model for computing water surface profiles have been utilized. The use of the developed system is demonstrated with a case study of the Adyar river in the Madras metropolitan city to evolve the safe releases that can be followed during flood considering the reservoir inflows and the overland flow from the urban drainage area. The developed expert system could be a valuable tool in reservoir operation decision-making and thereby help in minimizing the flood damages in the Adyar river flood plains.