The studies of arbitrary partionable or arbitrary decomposable graphs (more strictly speaking - trees) were independently initiated by two groups of authors corresponding to the first two papers on this subject:
The motivation for the French group (from LRI in Orsay) was a division problem of a large computer network and allocating its parts to independent users. The Slovak-Polish group (from UJPS in Kosice and AGH) intended to transfer the problem of arbitrary partitions of edge sets into the vertex setting.
A survey of the results up to 2008 is included, e.g., in the overview presentation [delivered as a plenary lecture at the Second Polish Combinatorial Conference (2nd Polish Combinatorial Conference, 2PCC) in Będlewo in 2008.]