  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.
