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The modular decomposition is a technique that applies but is not restricted to graphs. The notion of module naturally appears in the proofs of many graph theoretical theorems. Computing the modular decomposition tree is an important preprocessing step to solve a larger number of combinatorial optimization problems. Since the first polynomial time algorithm in the early 70's, the algorithmic of the modular decomposition has known an important development. This paper survey the ideas and techniques that arose from this line of research.

International audienceWe present a linear-time algorithm to compute a decomposition scheme for graphs G that have a set X⊆V(G), called a treewidth-modulator, such that the treewidth of G − X is bounded by a constant. Our decomposition, called a protrusion decomposition, is the cornerstone in obtaining the following two main results. Our first result is that any parameterized graph problem (with parameter k) that has a finite integer index and such that Yes-instances have a treewidth-modulator of size O(k) admits a linear kernel on the class of H-topological-minor-free graphs, for any fixed graph H. This result partially extends previous meta-theorems on the existence of linear kernels on graphs of bounded genus and H-minor-free graphs. Let F be a fixed finite family of graphs containing at least one planar graph. Given an n-vertex graph G and a non-negative integer k, Planar-F-Deletion asks whether G has a set X⊆V(G) such that |X| ⩽ k and G − X is H-minor-free for every H ε F. As our second application, we present the first single-exponential algorithm to solve Planar-F-Deletion. Namely, our algorithm runs in time 2O(k) · n2, which is asymptotically optimal with respect to k. So far, single-exponential algorithms were only known for special cases of the family F