A linear time algorithm for finding tree-decompositions of small treewidth

In this paper, we give for constant $k$ a linear-time algorithm that, given a graph $G=(V,E)$, determines whether the treewidth of $G$ is at most $k$ and, if so, finds a tree-decomposition of $G$ with treewidth at most $k$. A consequence is that every minor-closed class of graphs that does not contain all planar graphs has a linear-time recognition algorithm. Another consequence is that a similar result holds when we look instead for path-decompositions with pathwidth at most some constant $k$.