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A flood hazard is one of the most common and destructive natural disasters. Flood risk reduction with non-engineering measures has become the primary goal for flood management. This paper proposes an approach to improve the flood control operation for cascade reservoirs by minimizing flood control risk. A framework of reservoir flood control operation coupled with risk assessment (RFCORA) and the corresponding RFCORA model are proposed to reduce risk. The model contains three sub-modules. A real-time reservoir flood control operation simulation module is developed, in which a flood discharge control chart is used to determine the flood magnitude, and flood release is obtained by operation rules. Entropy-weighted fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is applied to assess the risk level in the flood risk assessment module. Finally, the flood release is updated according to the developed outflow adjustment optimization module aimed at minimizing flood control risk by combing future inflow information. In addition, another model without outflow adjustment optimization is set to be a comparative experiment. The water system of the Upper Yellow River is selected as a case study to verify the model. The results show that the framework and RFCORA model developed in this paper can decrease the time duration in the highest risk level without increasing the maximum water level and maximum outflow of reservoirs. The approach proposed in this paper based on flood control operation and flood risk assessment can be extended to flood mitigation in other water systems in similar situations.