A potline is a row of cells that each want to sit in a band a few degrees wide. One of them drifting out of that band is not dramatic. It is a slow loss of current efficiency that shows up as metal you did not make, and the first place it becomes undeniable is a month end report.
The reason it runs that long is not that nobody is watching. It is that watching means reading 31TI0121.PV on one screen, AL1.ELE.POT003.BATH_TEMP on another, and knowing that the second one is the same sensor. Somebody at the works knows. That knowledge is in a person, on shift, and it does not scale to twenty-two cells and five systems.
What Auge does here is unglamorous. It reads the tags from all five systems into one model, settles which of them are the same physical point, decodes the ones still arriving as unscaled current loops, and lists every instrument that died and kept publishing a flat line. Then it scores each point against the band it held in its own first two days, so a cell drifting out of its own normal is visible on the day it starts rather than at the month end.