In many real-world multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems, mining the inter-relationships and possible hierarchical structures among the factors are considered to be one of the primary tasks. But, besides that, one major task is to determine an optimal strategy to work on the factors to enhance the effect on the goal attribute. This paper proposes two such strategies, namely parallel and hierarchical effort assignment, and propagation strategies. The concept of effort propagation through a strategy is formally defined and described in the paper. Both the parallel and hierarchical strategies are divided into sub-strategies based on whether the assignment of efforts to the factors is uniform or depends upon some appropriate heuristics related to the factors in the system. The adapted and discussed heuristics are the relative significance and effort propagability of the factors. The strategies are analyzed for a real-life case study regarding Indian high school administrative factors that play an important role in enhancing students' performance. Total effort propagation of around 7%-15% to the goal is seen across the proposed strategies given a total of 1 unit of effort to the directly accessible factors of the system. A comparative analysis is adapted to determine the optimal strategy among the proposed ones to enhance student performance most effectively. The highest effort propagation achieved in the work is approximately 14.4348%. The analysis in the paper establishes the necessity of research towards the direction of effort propagation analysis in case of decision-making problems.

翻译：在许多现实世界的多属性决策问题中，挖掘因素间的相互关系及可能的层次结构被认为是首要任务之一。但除此之外，另一项重要任务是确定作用于因素以增强对目标属性影响的最优策略。本文提出了两种此类策略，即并行式与层次式努力分配与传播策略。文中正式定义了通过策略进行努力传播的概念并加以描述。基于对因素的努力分配是均匀的还是取决于系统中与因素相关的某些适当启发式信息，并行和层次策略均被划分为子策略。所采用并讨论的启发式信息包括因素的相对重要性和努力可传播性。这些策略在一个关于印度高中管理因素的现实案例研究中得到分析，这些因素对提升学生表现起着重要作用。在向系统中可直接访问因素投入总共1单位努力的情况下，各策略观察到向目标的总努力传播约为7%-15%。通过比较分析，从所提策略中确定了最能有效提升学生表现的最优策略。本研究实现的最高努力传播率约为14.4348%。本文的分析证明了在决策问题中进行努力传播分析研究的必要性。