A survey on algorithmic aspects of modular decomposition

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 large 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

Algorithmic Aspects of a General Modular Decomposition Theory

A new general decomposition theory inspired from modular graph decomposition is presented. This helps unifying modular decomposition on different structures, including (but not restricted to) graphs. Moreover, even in the case of graphs, the terminology ``module'' not only captures the classical graph modules but also allows to handle 2-connected components, star-cutsets, and other vertex subsets. The main result is that most of the nice algorithmic tools developed for modular decomposition of graphs still apply efficiently on our generalisation of modules. Besides, when an essential axiom is satisfied, almost all the important properties can be retrieved. For this case, an algorithm given by Ehrenfeucht, Gabow, McConnell and Sullivan 1994 is generalised and yields a very efficient solution to the associated decomposition problem