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This paper implements a knowledge-acquisition system for building a diagnostic knowledge-base of large-scale processing plants. The large-scale plants are so complicated to analyze numerically, further in some cases it is impossible to formulate the numerical models expressed in term of the differential equations. In view of this circumstance, a great use is made of the qualitative simulation to generate diagnostic rules. In researches about the qualitative simulation, the method of model description is concerned with knowledge explanation and the method for simulation. In this paper, we propose a qualitative network model in which an object-oriented approach is taken. The inheritance mechanism and the newly introduced instance linking mechanism allow systematic building of large-scale models.