This paper presents a study on application of expert system technique for the diagnosis of fire-causes in plants. A need is recognized for new methods to diagnose exactly the causes of fires without the help of the human experts. To cope with the difficulty, the expert system techiuque is applied to this area. The expert system suggested in this paper is developed to infer the causes of fires(or, ignition source ) by using the information drawn from the circumstances in fire. For the convenience of inference, ignition sources we classified into eight types ; elecoic spark, adiabatic compression, welding spark, material of high temperature, impact and friction, spontaneous ignition, naked fire, and static electricity. The knowledge base is composed of the rule base and dynamic database, which contain the rules and facts obtained by the expenence in this area, respectively. Both depth-first search and backward chaining schemes are used in reasoning process. This expert system is written in an artificial intelligence language "PROLOG", and its availability is demonstrated through the case study.