The purpose of this study is to propose the alternative development method by means of determining the optimal project size from the economic viewpoint, improving the existing method depending on engineering aspects. To this end, this study defined the flood mitigation projects as the production activities carried out by inputs and outputs, and proposed the alternative development method on the basis of optimizing input and output combinations. This paper, as the case study of the proposed method, developed alternatives for the flood mitigation planning of Youngsan River Basin by determining the optimal project scale. As the result of determining optimal project size, the net benefit of the optimal alternative tended to be dependent on the net benefits of the large individual proposals. Due to such problem, the effect of relatively small individual proposals are underestimated and possibly be excluded from the optimal alternative, which may result in exclusion of the potential damaged regions protected by them from the flood mitigation project. Thus for the selective flood protection by region, individual proposals need to be categorized into the global measures and local measures according to the flood protection area.