In mid-July 2021, record breaking precipitation fell in Western Europe, causing rivers to overflow their banks. This event has demonstrated that measures are necessary, leading to the JCAR-ATRACE collaboration which brings together multiple hydraulic engineering institutes across Europe to enhance resilience to extreme climate events and fosters long-term research partnerships. This MSc thesis is a contribution to this joint collaboration. The goal of this project was to investigate the potential of detention basins along the Rur river in Germany and optimize their operational strategy to mitigate flood risk near in particular the village of Ophoven, which had suffered from recent floods. A one-dimensional kinematic model was developed of the main river, the floodplains and basins between Jülich and Ophoven. Initially for four basins, the opening times and crest heights of the weirs were sequentially optimized to minimize the peak water height near Ophoven for the 1/100 years flood event. The predictions of the 1D model were verified against the HydroAS2D model which solves the 2D shallow water equations. The optimization revealed that the chosen volumes of the four basins were too small. A method to estimate the required storage volume for a desired downstream peak water height reduction was applied. Then a much larger basin, close to Jülich, was considered. It was found that apart from choosing the appropriate opening time and crest height, not only the storage volume but also the width of the inlet is important. In addition to optimizing the operation of the weirs, the potential of a basin with an un-operated compound weir with four fixed crests was studied. The crest heights were optimized for the 1/100 flood wave. The optimized compound weir, tested for the small detention basin 1 as an alternative to the operated weir, achieved similar level of peak reduction when optimized for the same flood event. However, when the compound weir is applied to another flood event, it can become ineffective. The operated weir is more flexible, but requires that the upstream hydrograph is measured at sufficiently large distance from the basin.